Poetry, Conflict, and Context

Eliza Griswold has traveled the world researching conflicts.

Over the summer, The New York Times Magazine published her article "Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?" For her first book, The Tenth Parallel, she spent years traveling in Africa and Asia along the fault line where Christianity and Islam intersect and interact.

On Wednesday, October 14, she will speak about her work as a reporter during a Religion in the News event at the Center for the Study of World Religions at noon. Later that day, at 6 pm in Divinity Hall Chapel, she will discuss her latest work, I Am the Beggar of the World, a collection of translated landays from Afghan women for which she won a 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

HDS communications reached out to Griswold to discuss her work and how it has impacted her own faith.

HDS: You recently wrote an in-depth piece in The New York Times Magazine about the persecution of Christians by ISIS and other extremist groups in the Middle East. The headline posed the question, "Is this the End of Christianity in the Middle East?" So, are we seeing the end of Christianity in the Middle East?

EG: I try to avoid such stark terms as a careful journalist. There's never going to be the end of Christianity in the birthplace of the religion, but is it the end of a thriving, vibrant Christian community? Christians are certainly facing a series of diverse challenges, and these communities are absolutely imperiled. Unless action is taken to safeguard their survival, we are unlikely to see Christians flourishing  and more likely to see their continuing diminishment in the Middle East.

HDS: Is this purely a religious conflict? What else is at play?

EG: Absolutely not. After years of covering conflict about religious identity, I've never come across some conflict that doesn't have some underlying context, whether it be exacerbated by climate change, elections, electricity, or education. All of these secular factors—these questions of political and social economy—impact conflict between two people that often takes on the color of religion.

HDS: You've traveled to various other countries reporting on conflicts between religious groups for your earlier book, The Tenth Parallel, and other outlets. What instances of peacebuilding or peacemaking were you able to witness?

EG: The strongest would be in Nigeria along the fault line that runs between the north and south. There,  a pastor and an imam who were formally enemies now work together to maintain peace in communities that often still explode in violence between Christians and Muslims.  What they do is to find common bonds between shared values over community issues, such as firewood.

One of the things that Christians and Muslims have fought over is wood, which is increasingly scarce due to climate pressures. Working with Christian and Muslim women, the pastor and imam have helped communities buy low-wood burning stoves for instance. This builds social bonds that countermand a rush to violence, which is easier when you don't know your enemy as your neighbor. (Pastor James Movel Wuye and Imam Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa will speak at HDS on December 10).

HDS: You are both a poet and a journalist. How do you view those two, sometimes very different styles of writing, as informing one another?

EG: They're both about paying attention. The more carefully I pay attention to the world, both the interior and exterior of the world, the more accurately I can understand myself, and that's really where the poetry comes from. So, they actually are pretty continuous.

HDS: Your father was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. How has that affected your reporting?

EG: It has definitely affected my ability and interest in terms of talking to people of different faith backgrounds, because I grew up around the kitchen table where we would have people from such different backgrounds and really smart people who believed honestly in God. It's not hard for me to talk to people really in any place on the religious spectrum, and it's not hard for me to take their beliefs seriously and not think that I know better. I think that's a real flaw we see in the media today, and I think people try to do that in explaining why a conflict isn't religious. A lot of my work is trying to listen to where people are coming from.

HDS: Have the stories you’ve reported on impacted your own faith? How so?

EG: Absolutely. What I had not factored in writing The Tenth Parallel is that I would go ask people about belief in their lives, and their first question back to me was “What do you believe?”. That has helped me to seek the answer to those questions more profoundly.

HDS: One of your most recent works is I Am the Beggar of the World. Where did the idea for this project come from?

EG: It came from an older book of these landays by Said Majrouh, an Afghan intellectual who was assassinated by the Taliban in the 1990s. He went around Pakistan recording folk poems by women and those were mostly about exile. I was working with Seamus Murphy, the photographer who gave me this book, and we decided to go back and capture the impact the last decade of war and occupation has had from women's perspective. These are the voices most imperiled as the international community draws its forces, and its support, away from Afghanistan.

HDS: What's the message that you hope readers get from the collection?

EG: I hope readers understand that Afghan women are not mute blue ghosts behind a burka, rather that their consciousness and sensibility is as sharp, as angry, and is full of dark humor as our own, if not more so. Recording these poems helped me understand Afghan women's perspective much more profoundly, and I hope that's the experience the readers have as well.

—by Michael Naughton