A Thousand Twelve Questions

And now the project. This project has been gestating awhile. A long while. Frankly, I’ve been wrestling with how to structure the thing. I’d thought I’d blend all my experience together – the Sabean, my fixer, Damascus, etc. – into a larger metastory about the Iraqi diaspora.  Lately that’s seemed unwieldy. There is so much there. So much to tell. But upon reflection it did not seem to hang together. So I’m taking a different direction.

Now I’m going to break the whole into pieces. I’m going to work on two main pieces – the Sabean and the fixer.  The Sabean story stands on it’s own. An ancient people besieged, in exile and in danger of being lost. The individual stories I heard are harrowing and need to be told. While there are nuances and convolutions, their story is straightforward really.

The fixer story is more complex in a way. Rana, my fixer, translator and guide, tells a compelling story as well but one fraught with contradiction. And questions for me as a journalist. While her commitment to my work is unquestioned, her character is less easily ascertained. Does she have an agenda? I’ll have to dig into that, ferret out some truths. We’ll see.