The old stories from the Garden of Eden, the paradise through which the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers flowed, tell us of people who had everything at their disposal. They lived in harmony with the earth, which in turn provided them with its inexhaustible abundance. They were obedient toward their creator. And they were in harmony with the universe. But they lived in a state of not knowing. It was the growing mind, the urge for knowledge, the growing out of blind obedience that led to the expulsion from paradise. The consequence of expulsion is exile.

From 2017 to 2021, I spent time in the once Biblical paradise. I led workshops of literature and theater in the countryside around the Euphrates in Tigris in Iraq. Certainly the conditions I met were rather contrary to paradise, but it was the grounds of a very old culture. When I stood with my translator Emad in Basra, Iraq, in November 2018 in front of the showcases of the not-yet-opened Basra Museum with five-thousand-year-old objects from the Sumerian culture, he said, “A community of people builds something. People cultivate their land. They become prosperous. They live in harmony with each other and with their surroundings. They think other people are just as peaceful as they are. They no longer have weapons. That is a mistake. They forget that they become easy prey for others who are after their hard-earned wealth.”

This old man grew up in a land marked by wars and violence but with a five-thousand-year-old culture in his background. He knew what he was talking about.

The Writers-in-Exile Program of PEN Germany

As a member of PEN Germany, I became a Writers-in-Exile officer in 2021. It is voluntary work. This scholarship program of PEN Germany awards grants to writers who suffer persecution, imprisonment, or expulsion in their countries of origin as a consequence of their writings and the freedom of the word they want to express. There is certainly no need to emphasize the fact that these writers come from countries with authoritarian or autocratic regimes or dictatorships. They leave their homeland with a suitcase, and they may never return. They leave behind relatives without knowing whether they will see them again. They arrive in a foreign world and a foreign culture.

When a messenger gave Tigranes (140–55 BC), the Armenian tyrant and dictator, bad news about his enemy, he beheaded the messenger. Plutarch, in his Life of Lucullus, records that when Tigranes killed the messenger, “No one else would tell him anything, and so he sat in ignorance while the fires of war were already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him (549–450).” Sophocles (497/496–406/407 BC), an ancient Greek tragedian, observed, “Nobody loves the bringer of bad news (24). The “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” declaration and adage respond to despots like Tigranes who listen only to those who flatter.

At the heart of the “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” statement is the belief, rooted in the ancient rhetoric theories set forth by Plutarch, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, and Cicero, that the bearer of bad news needs to be heard. Shooting the messenger with vital information guarantees that citizens will, like Tigranes, “sit in ignorance.” The “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” message has ancient origins and a host of modern expressions.

Tigranes serves as a model for modern-day tyrants and dictators who have silenced, killed, and forced into exile journalists from Gaza, Russia, Ukraine, and other countries for recording and publishing their acts of murder, tyranny, and dictatorship. Several courageous journalists, victims of state violence, were honored guests at the “Extra! Extra! Don’t Kill the Messenger: Migrating to Stay Alive” conference at the University of Oregon April 4–7, 2024. The conference brought writers seeking refuge outside their home countries, journalists who performed with great courage in reporting on American racism, and scholars to hear threatened journalists speak on successful and tragic reporting in the face of mortal danger.

“Don’t Shoot the Messenger” was the throughline of the “Extra! Extra!” symposium, highlighting the need for courageous journalists willing to take risks and the responsibilities of the journalist’s audience to protect and honor both the journalist and the journalist’s message. The journalist’s audience is responsible for resisting the temptation to engage in the symbolic decapitation of the journalist by ignoring their reports or dismissing them because they bear bad news or confront cherished beliefs. Journalists are responsible for adapting and adjusting their reports to achieve communion with their audience by using all the available means of persuasion. Facts do not speak for themselves.

That picture haunts me. It has a permanent hold on my mind. That’s me, being punched and kicked, knocked to the ground, and kicked and punched again. Seeing it focuses my mind with painful clarity. That moment was captured by Jack Thornell, 25, The Associated Press’ Pulitzer prize-winning photographer who only two months before and one hundred miles to the north had witnessed with his camera the attempted assassination of James Meredith, a brave civil rights pioneer, shot by White supremacist, Aubrey James Norvell, in broad daylight on Highway 51 in Hernando, Mississippi. Meredith, the first African American to attend and graduate from the University of Mississippi, better known as Ole Miss, was staging a one-man march to encourage other Black men to defy the Ku Klux Klan by registering to vote. If enough Black people registered to vote, they could elect local sheriffs to protect them from the Klan and they could help elect members of Congress and presidents. The KKK, America’s oldest and most powerful domestic terrorist organization, was dedicated to keeping Black people from voting.

Looking back at Thornell’s picture of the assault on me through the lens of history more than fifty years later, I see my fingers interlaced behind my head. It was my desperate attempt to protect my skull and my brain from the next blow. I knew to do that with my hands only because I had previously covered a nonviolent civil rights training for interracial volunteers who were going to go out and march into the face of hatred and almost certain furious segregationist violence. At the time, I remember, thinking, well, I hope that does them some good. Fortunately, I’m a reporter, so nobody’s going to want to hit me. I was twenty-two and dumb as a rock growing up and then working in what were very safe places, at least for me.

Music conveys unity, story, collective joy and sorrow, and visions of hope— which may be why at every juncture of social change or revolution, artists are often at the front of the line in framing songs of struggle, wishes for reconciliation or war’s opposite, and celebrations of the spirit.

Resistance is hardwired into the creative impulse, where the question is prized over the easy answer, and the act of inspiring a crowd to sing in either celebration or protest is a powerful thing. And it may be no small wonder, in fact, that in times and places of war and conflict, authoritarian rule, environmental crisis, or revolution that artists, writers, and creative catalysts’ voices are silenced or simply eradicated.

This playlist was chosen and curated as part of the “Extra! Extra! Don’t Kill the Messenger: Migrating to Stay Alive” symposium, which focused on news reporting in places of conflict, the reality of refugee journalists, writers in exile, and scholars of journalism who have had to migrate to stay alive. It was intended both to entertain and give moments of reflection within the schedule of a heavy symposium topic, as well as to add some musical perspective and context to the issues of exile and resistance.

For more than four decades as a journalist in Las Vegas, Jeff German was a pugnacious investigator. The rollicking, glamorous, but gritty news town provided plenty of dramatic sagas and malevolent characters for German to explore with his blend of curiosity, vigor, tenaciousness, fearlessness, and eye for detail.

Nurturing a list of contacts most other journalists can only dream about, German unearthed compelling stories and captured behind-the-scenes context of ongoing local issues. He pursued scoops with what his colleagues frequently said was “courage, relentlessness and an innate sense of fairness and justice.”

First with the Las Vegas Sun and then with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, German [pronounced GARE-mun] reported on organized crime, government, politics, and the courts. He told the story of the 1997 murder of bookie and mob associate Herbert Blitzstein. He reported on an FBI investigation into bribes and unreported campaign contributions accepted by Clark County commissioners. He and a team of reporters uncovered a public-private partnership’s wasteful spending. He examined inspection failures that preceded a deadly apartment fire.

After a gunman perched on Mandalay Bay’s thirty-second floor killed 58 people (two others later died from their wounds) and injured hundreds more at a concert on October 1, 2017, German reported that the sniper also fired at jet fuel tanks at the nearby airport, apparently hoping to produce an explosion.

Beyond his long-term print reporting, he provided additional insight into the history and diminishing role of the mob in the city while co-hosting an award-winning podcast, Mobbed Up: The Fight for Las Vegas.

My father, brothers, and I ran outside after we heard a loud explosion near our house. Just moments before the explosion, my brother Yama Siawash left our apartment to go to work. When we heard the blast, we called Yama to see if he was okay, but he wasn’t responding to our phone calls. As we approached the scene, we found the car Yama was in engulfed in flames. It was approximately 7:35 a.m. on November 7, 2020, when Yama was killed in a targeted attack.

I come from a family of journalists. We had an independent family newspaper called Armaghan e Melli—which means National Gift in Farsi—in Afghanistan, which was in print and online. My father, Mohammed Dawood Siawash, founded the newspaper in 2005. My father was the editor in chief of Armaghan e Melli and my brothers Yama, Babak, and Kawoos and I had various positions at the newspaper. My little sisters, Anahita and Nahid, also worked for the newspaper under the supervision of the editorial board.

Our father was among the pioneers of free press in Afghanistan. He dedicated his life and career to journalism. My siblings and I wanted to follow our father’s footsteps to be a journalist just like him. At Armaghan e Melli, we worked closely with our father, giving us the invaluable privilege to gain a profound wealth of knowledge from his expertise and wisdom. Through this experience, Armaghan e Melli became our own center of learning, where we gained a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies involved in running a publication. My father also had an extensive home library, filled with a wide range of books, from history and poetry to children’s short stories. We would often spend hours there, immersed in the world of storytelling.

But my passion for journalism took root in my childhood. My siblings and I grew up listening to the news. In our apartment, every morning, my dad would tune in to the BBC Radio and take notes about the news. And then, I would read his notes and emulate the reporter. I would try to mimic the tone and delivery of the presenters, imagining myself on air. This routine became a daily ritual as I eagerly anticipated each new opportunity to practice becoming a journalist. I would also look forward to visiting my uncle who was a journalist. Whenever I visited him, he would give me a newspaper and record me reading the news on his tape recorder.

Whenever I’m invited to speak about press freedom in Mexico, I usually start with an anecdote. It dates to around 2010, when I just started as a freelance reporter in Mexico, mostly for Dutch news outlets. It's the story of a reporter in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, a region plagued for decades now by a violent turf war between criminal gangs, popularly—though not with me, more about that later—as “the cartels.” It's a conversation I had with a reporter who left the state just a short time prior. He worked at a local newspaper in one of the cities bordering Texas. One day, as he sat down at his desk early in the morning, he received a phone call. He knew the caller, a member of a local gang.

“We’re going to drop a body soon,” he said, giving him directions to the place where the remains would be left. “I want you to go there, take photos, put it in the paper.”

The reporter nervously hung up. He knew what this meant. This was not a friendly tip for a paper to get a story—it was an order. Not publishing the story would have consequences and in Tamaulipas, those consequences could mean abduction, torture, disappearance in a clandestine grave. He had no choice but to comply.

Then he got a second phone call. Another gang, rivals of the first one, this time. “We heard that they’re going to leave a body later today.” The speaker gave him the address. Same place as mentioned in the first call. “You are not allowed, under any circumstances, to publish any of it. No photos, no nota. Nothing.”

At this point, a cold feeling of dread took hold of the reporter. He could neither comply with nor refuse both orders. Any choice would mean his death, possible that of his family. In Tamaulipas, reporters know this. Everyone knows this. He was in an impossible situation.

So, he fled. He crossed the border that same day, never to return.

The anecdote is fifteen years old now, and some of the details are, admit¬tedly, a bit apocryphal now. I never ran his story for my Dutch newspaper Trouw, for whom I still work as a correspondent today; he begged me not to. The chance that a gang member of authority in Mexico would get their hands on a newspaper published in Amsterdam and read a story, in Dutch, is neg¬ligible. But even as an inexperienced reporter with barely a year in Mexico under my belt, I knew better than to disregard the genuine terror my Mexican colleague was feeling.

Journalism is the only job I did in Zimbabwe, starting as a novice in 1987 after graduating from Harare Polytechnic College with a degree in mass communication. I worked at the government’s Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation Radio Four. We produced educational programs. but for the most part it served as a government mouthpiece. All content was monitored, even the music we played on air.

As I got confident on the job, I was entrusted with hosting one of the popular but sensitive phone-in programs. I would invite various specialists in their field of work to talk about their vocations and how they were contributing to society. Listeners would call in and have their questions answered live on the air.

Government ministers began showing a lot of interest in this show, especially as elections approached. They started requesting to be interviewed.

Zimbabwe started deteriorating when its economy started sliding in the laste 1990s. This began when the government gave huge payouts to more than 36,000 unemployed former freedom fighters. The ripple effects were harrowing, and people started losing their jobs.

My journalistic nose for news started to itch. I remembered the training I had had—promoting transparency, holding the government accountable, and advocating for citizen’s rights. I lined up different government ministers to participate in my no-holds-barred live radio talk show. My aim was to discuss the impacts of government cuts and to investigate how people were managing as social services were reduced and privatized. As listeners exposed more and more government officials during these broadcasts, I found myself in a precarious situation.

I was cautioned. The phone calls from listeners were now being recorded before they were aired. The time allocated to this program was reduced. I began to be monitored closely, and all my spoken-word recordings were assessed before each broadcast. This was just the beginning of my woes.

How do citizens in exile view news from home? What’s the point of journalism that no one is consuming? Where does news go once persecuted reporters in exile hit “publish” on their stories?

Throughout this book, as was the case at the companion symposium on the University of Oregon campus in the spring of 2024, you are brought face-to-face with the grim realities many of our counterparts face in trying to get the news—the truth—to their audiences. In this chapter, we investigate how exiled citizens curate, filter, and interpret news from their home countries. Three journalist-students (deliberate wording) shoe-leathered into the homes and workplaces of individuals, each of them from nations that exert deplorable oppresions of press freedoms, in the Oregon Willamette Valley from Portland to Eugene to find out. What warms this teacher’s heart is to see the glow that the three selected reporters felt after getting this assignment. I can assure readers that this project solidified each of their respective resolves to speak truth to power, to appreciate their freedoms, and to tell stories that need daylight.

The three contributors, Julia Boboc, Malya Fass, and Mario Ponce Martinez de la Riva, offer diverse perspectives on the experiences of migrants far from home and the role of journalism. They delve into the challenges faced by immigrants in navigating news media, the impact of biased reporting, and the importance of diverse voices in journalism.

Boboc focuses on the stories of three immigrant women—from Mexico, Chile, and Colombia—exploring their news consumption habits and their desires for more inclusive and positive representation. Fass highlights the challenges faced by journalists in exile, particularly focusing on the experiences of an Afghan journalist who fled persecution. Ponce Martinez de la Riva delves into the experiences of Hispanic immigrants in the US, examining their perceptions of news media and their own identities.

That label that carried the word PRESS, I assumed, guaranteed my safety. But I was completely mistaken …

I loved to keep my press gear clean and shining after every round of escalation, preparing it for the next. I used to love wearing it despite the pain I felt as my body carried the heavy weight of it. I felt proud, and my kids felt proud seeing me in it too.

But since October 7, 2023, this reality and my entire life changed forever!

I remember that day vividly, and then the days, weeks, and months that followed. Every single day felt surreal, and I grasped to keep myself going.

It wasn’t the extreme exhaustion, the shock, the worry, and the constant threat to my life—all this was manageable.

What I couldn’t endure was the everyday danger that surrounded my precious ones: my husband and kids. I didn’t allow myself to even imagine the possibility of losing any of them, and I prayed I wouldn’t live to see it.

I reported about homes being targeted, neighborhoods completely wiped out, forced displacement of thousands of people. I reported about the beast of starvation slowly eating young and old, the thirst among everyone, and the challenges to get your battery charged, so you can have some light for your kids at night. I reported about widespread diseases and injuries most horrific among children.

Until I realized I was reporting about my own family’s suffering—about my own children, my own fears and hardships like any other mother around me!

But my kids weren’t as lucky as others, because I couldn’t be home with them during all this misery and despair. I wanted to scream many times: I am helpless for my children! I can’t keep them safe, full, or hydrated!

I couldn't keep them in my arms when those missiles fell around them!

Whenever someone speaks about threats to journalism, we tend to imagine physical violence or flagrant restrictions to free speech. Those are, for sure, the most concerning menaces that journalism now faces and the ones that need more attention since colleagues are risking their lives every day to guarantee the right of information. Nothing is more important than preserving them and amplifying their reporting. Many of the stories in this book are related to that kind of censorship and, as I am going to tell you later on, I have also suffered from it. However, a more common version of censorship is harder to identify, and that’s the reason why it spreads easily all over the world. Academics and communication theorists tend to refer to it as soft censorship or indirect censorship. Even when they don’t imply risk for life, their effects prevent both journalists from reporting freely according to public interest and the audience from enjoying their right of information and communication.

Since this kind of censorship is less noticeable, I will mention here a few examples from different countries to show that these kinds of restrictions to journalism are present all over the world. I hope that this will help contribute to finding possible ways to defend our societies from it.

This selection of cases was arbitrary. I learned about them from personal or professional experience. These are not the only countries in which this kind of censorship is taking place (because it happens in most of the countries of the world). These are also not the worst versions of what is occurring in those countries. But my own practice as a reporter taught me that it is better to avoid generalizations. If you can describe some events thoroughly in their context, you might help your audience not only to understand what is happening there, but also to reflect on other situations in which similar things are happening.

It's good to reflect every once in a while on how we’ve arrived to where we are. The choices we’ve made. Things that have happened to us.

Sometimes I tell people I won the lottery of life experience.

A big reason for that luck is that I’ve chosen unfamiliar paths, put myself in uncomfortable situations, never tried to avoid new experiences or people who were different than me. That led me to many unexpected opportunities. And later some problems.

I don't know if I’d make all those same choices today.

It's a very different world, and there are two threats germane to this book that I will address here—one to our personal sense of liberty, and the other to journalism.

When I was in my twenties, I traveled a lot. I had visited forty countries by the time I was twenty-five. The dollar was historically strong, and international travel had never been so accessible to so many young people.

Using my blue passport felt to me like a very American thing to do. To explore. Push beyond what I knew. Engage with people of different languages, cultures, and beliefs. It may not feel like it today, but those are core American values—always have been.

If my dad were alive and here today and you had the chance to talk to him, you’d quickly notice that he had a strong command of the English language and American idioms. But he also had a very thick accent.

So naturally people would ask him, “Where are you from?”

And he would say, “I’m Iranian by birth, and I’m American by choice, and I’m proud of both.”

In a world where we’ve been told those two cultures are incompatible with each other, the idea that you could hold these supposed conflicting identities simultaneously became a guiding principle for me.

In 2009 I moved to Iran, one of the least free countries in the world—the country where my late father was born.

I went there to work as a journalist. And I was pretty good at it. Good enough that I got one of the dream journalism jobs as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post.

This chapter will examine the writing of Rachel Cusk to further develop the possibility that there does not have to be a hero in a narrative, and the corresponding idea that one might not even be the hero of one's own narrative. Narrative, beyond its necessary involvement in her work as a writer, is a large thematic preoccupation within Cusk's writing. Her novels and essays are strewn with various meditations on the relationship between narrative and life, oftentimes in connection with a specific feeling that will be my focus in this chapter: an experience of intensity that simultaneously seems disconnected from any larger sense of narrative, paired with an awareness of this disconnection. It is not only her novels themselves that are aware of this feeling, but also the characters, who tend to remark upon it, whether in speech or internal monologues. Narrative and narration are thus vital problems for Cusk, and this feeling of disconnection is at play in many passages that describe experiences that can be deemed aesthetic due to their affective valence and their resonance with such experiences in the novels discussed in previous chapters.

The problem of narrative surfaces in various ways throughout Cusk's entire body of work. Beginning on the more recent end with her 2021 novel Second Place, we find such phrases as “the telling comes after the fact,” and “no story to life, no personal meaning beyond the meaning of any given moment.” Second Place is written as a series of letters addressed to “Jeffers”— the novel's stand-in for Robinson Jeffers, close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose letters regarding her relationship with D. H. Lawrence in Lorenzo in Taos provide a rich and complex backdrop of inspiration for Cusk here—and the above phrases reveal a narrative voice aware of its attempts to make sense of events at the same time as it narrates them. Moving to one of her earlier and more conventional novels, The Temporary (1995), a mundane workplace exchange about the previous weekend yields the following: “She would ask him questions with apparently no memory of repetition or rebuff, retaining nevertheless the few blunt details he was obliged to divulge about his activities outside the office and stringing together a little narrative from them of which it pained Ralph to be the subject.”

Introduction

In 2021, Charlie Hebdo's press, Les Échappés, published Janvier 2015, Le Procès, a sober, well-documented book about the trial of the terrorist attacks on the journal that shook the world in 2015. The trial, which took place from 2 September to 16 December 2020, brought 14 people to the dock who were accused of having been accomplices to the terrorists (who themselves had died during the attacks), and gave survivors, family, police and hostages the chance to give a testimony of the events, often for the first time. Written by Yannick Haenel and illustrated by François Boucq – who had both joined the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo after 2015, and first published in daily instal-ments on the journal's website and in weekly dispatches in the journal – the book gives a subdued but detailed depiction of the proceedings, fulfilling the request of Charlie Hebdo's chief editor, Riss, to create a written monument for the victims of the attack.

Janvier 2015 is in many ways a unique work. Haenel's writing is precise and factual but its tone is mournful and engaging, and Boucq's sober illustrations in ink and watercolours beautifully evoke the atmosphere in the courtroom without being sentimental. As Cynthia Rose remarked in her review in The Comics Journal, the book's use of a combination of images and words to report on the trial also draws attention to a genre of graphic journalism in which the journal has been a pioneer, namely that of the graphic trial report. Graphic trial reports are non-fiction comics that report on trials. It is a minor genre of comics that flourished in the journal after it had come under the editorship of Philippe Val in 1992, and started to print ‘serious’ journalism and graphic non-fiction to accompany the editorial cartoons and humoristic pieces it is better known for. Charlie Hebdo published a large number of such graphic trial reports, dealing with various topics, ranging from the highly politicised trials of the National Front and Scientology to trials of corrupt businessmen, murderers and petty criminals. The length of these reports varies. Some are just a page long.

Why Study Law in Comics?

In this chapter, I will try to explain why the analysis of the representation of law provided by comics can be very useful in shedding light on some major themes of legal theory and constitutional law. In a seminal piece, Asimow emphasised the potential of pop culture when teaching law courses:

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to this exercise that also apply to the use of comics. On the one hand, students will certainly be aided in their understanding of legal dynamics by the use of comic book stories and characters. The use of comics will also reduce the existing gap in knowledge between professors and students, in the sense that students will be able to start from a knowledge of the stories that will facilitate interaction. On the other hand, the vision that comics offer of law is certainly simplified or, rather, presents the same clichés that ordinary people have of law. As a law professor, I have to say that my students have generally always been more fascinated by outlaws than by the guardians of legality. Make no mistake, though, here the notion of outlaw does not necessarily include only villains, but also many of what we would call superheroes. This is also explained by the fact that the world in which these actors operate is often based on corrupt power dynamics. In this chapter, I will try to show the usefulness of comics-based legal research in investigating the pathological side of law, with particular reference to two phenomena: the insufficiency of law in the fight for justice and the use of laws as instruments for creating discrimination. These are obviously only two examples among many possible ones. In this sense, the chapter makes no claim to exhaustiveness.