(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Italian war reporter Francesca Borri told me the last time I filmed her in Oslo that she would travel behind the lines of IS. This week she writes from Northern Iraq in Ny Tid – the area Norway will soon send soldiers to. What makes a man, a woman in her 30s, expose herself to such dangers as she reports from Syria and Iraq? Borri has been among the victims of the war for years. I asked her why she is so preoccupied with death, and she replied, “I do not think I am near death all the time, I am rather very close to life! I live the life I want to live. We must all die once. My job is about life, not death. " Borri tells me that she feels far more alive in these surroundings than in Europe. When she received a journalist award in Paris, she just had to return quickly. She tells me that "Baghdad is beautiful, like Aleppo!" She also thinks Palestinian Ramallah is more beautiful than Paris. Now these cities in the Middle East are not exactly the biggest tourist destinations at the moment, so the beauty must be more on an existential level. In this week's front page article, she tells about when she thought she was dead after a bomb blast. She is close to the outer limits of existence, she is drawn to these areas where she experiences human closeness where so much is at stake. How long will this intense and dangerous life of Borri last? She is a veteran journalist and knows this game. She wears Arabic clothes. And meets sympathy – for example when she at border posts experiences that others speak Arabic to her to pretend that she is one of them. I ask again what she thinks about being killed. Her answer is that if someone cuts her throat, I had to know that it would probably be one of IS's foreign fighters in the area. One from Mexico, possibly. Men who are tempted to go down and make “adventurous” experiences they would otherwise not be able to get. Precisely such foreign wars, Danish Kim Leine writes about in the book The abyss, which will be published at Cappelen Damm on Saturday (see excerpts and interviews on pages 8-9). Between the covers you can actually read the word "dead" 235 times. The book was created from a film script, and was intended to be a couple of hundred pages, but ended up tripling. As Leine writes in the afterword, the novel is "about two twins, Kaj and Ib Gottlieb, about the war and about the equally difficult peace". For peace is for Leine – like for Borri – something gray and not very alive. In the interview here in the newspaper, Leine says that he could well have been recruited as a foreign warrior, despite the fact that he was once a pacifist. He misses real manhood rituals, he calls for growing up properly. Is he trying to provoke us, or does he really mean it? Leine begins the third part of the book by quoting from the revelation of John: “The other angel emptied his bowl into the sea; and it became blood as of a dead man, and every living soul in the sea died. " In the Middle East's civil wars, we now have an eternal vicious spiral of death – in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq. In this chaos one no longer knows where the fronts are, a brother or son is suddenly one's enemy. Borri finds herself in exactly the same chaos. As a stranger, she believes that the only people she can trust are the Syrians or the locals. The foreign warriors in IS stand for blood thirst – are they, in John's words, angels who think they are coming to find a meaning, but in this sea of blood rather cut off the heads of their captives? Why does someone seek this realm of the dead? Borri may be close to the truth, something I realize after talking to her for a few hours. We have become better acquainted, and I film her walking around among the tombstones at Our Savior's tomb, where she says: “What I write about is about the wounds. We are all affected by the wounds in our lives. It's about how you react when you get hurt. Even though I write about war injuries, I think about everyone's everyday life. " This is also the basis for how Israel oppresses Palestine, she says: "Somehow they try to do to others what was done to them, the Jews." She feels most at home in Palestine. This is the place Francesca returns to. She has no contact with family and friends in Italy, where they live their undisturbed, bourgeois lives. The last time she heard anything from there was when her brother asked for help with the tax return. In the war zones, "no one pretends to be your friends," she tells me. For a war reporter, there will obviously be plenty to do in the years to come. The unrest in the Middle East will last for years. The great destruction has created wounds that do not heal so easily. Francesca is probably as interested in something other than the direct acts of war she portrays – the original title of her latest book the war within (2014), which in Norwegian has been named In the war, means «the internal war». Francesca fights for human rights. She is far from the alien warriors she surrounds herself with. She lives in exile. Writing is also an exile, and on the travels Borri will always be a stranger. She ends our conversation in the cemetery with the fact that she is actually writing about loneliness. That's the most honest thing she can do – as we are all often quite strangers to ourselves. truls lie
