By Jo Mikula, Co-Editor-in-Chief
Since graduating from Haverford in 2009, Allyn Gaestel has built an impressive resume in human rights journalism. Gaestel began her career as a United Nations Correspondent, and has devoted her career to reporting on gender and human rights. She now has bylines in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. She has been awarded grants from the Pulitzer Center of Crisis Reporting and the United Nations Foundation, among others.
And yet, when Gaestel came to speak at Haverford on November 5, it was to explain why she has decided to leave journalism behind. “I spent years trying to make work that is nonviolent inside of a violent structure,” Gaestel explained. “Leaving journalism has been a casting off of what’s impure. It’s been spiritual.”
As Gaestel noted at the beginning of her talk, journalism is a structure historically associated with imperialistic whiteness. “Journalism constrains, contains, flattens, contorts places,” Gaestel said. “There is a ubiquity of white supremacy in journalism, in the stories we chose to tell, in the way they are told. War stories, belittling articles about white saviors, narratives of development, as if any country should or would want to end up like the West.” As for the way these stories are told, Gaestel noted that journalistic narratological conventions “narrate pejoratively what other people experience if it does not fit in the hegemony.”
She discussed what she understood as the most brutal aspects of journalism: the categorization of people and their re-victimization by telling narratives that center around trauma, the act of treating people as solely subjects rather than fully realized human beings. Gaestel recalled disheartening debates with editors who tried to shove her work back into more traditional forms and who eliminated language that Gaestel included in attempt to decolonize her writing.
As she has become more attuned to the implicit biases behind reporting, Gaestel came to believe that “journalism feeds colonial and capitalist end goals.” What Gaestel is advocating for now is more fluid and expansive than is often permitted by traditional journalism. “We have to allow for a beautiful, loving, human world to emerge,” said Gaestel. “The liberation of narrative is essential to this. Journalism must expand its framework to let the rest of reality in.”
This is a long and arduous process. It involves dismantling false hierarchies and ways of storytelling. It requires deep listening and deep transformation. It asks us to acknowledge that journalistic objectivity does not exist. We cannot erase the journalist and pretend that they give an unbiased account, because we only exist in relation to one another. “It is frightening to lose the systems through which we see the world,” admitted Gaestel. “But there is something broader, something truer.”
If Gaestel is now critiquing the way that journalism upholds a colonial global legacy and flattens stories to fit inside of a neocolonial capitalist worldview, it is in large part because of the people she met and the conversations she had in her time as an international reporter. Gaestel is white and from Los Angeles. She grew up saturated in the systems of colonial and capitalist consciousness that she now seeks to dismantle.
One of the first consciousness-raising moments in her career happened when she traveled to Nigeria to report on trauma and mental health in the aftermath of attacks by Boko Haram. In an article for the Haverford alumni magazine, Gaestel recalls realizing that she was working under the assumption that Nigeria did not have “all the healing structures that exist in the West.” The article goes on to note “her report ended up including interviews with psychologists as well as imams studying Islamic medicine, and took in the exorcism of djinns (supernatural beings) and the work of herbalists.”
Gaestel fell in love with Nigeria while reporting there, and moved to Lagos in 2015. As she began making connections in Nigeria, she started to learn more about wounds, spirituality, transformation, and the process of healing.
Some of Gaestel’s most profound evolution has come from African photographers whose work has been on exhibit in Nigeria. She devoted a large portion of her talk to showcasing the work of some of these photographers. There is Rahima Gambo, a Nigerian visual artist who has recently been working on a series called “Walking” that “intersects with documentary storytelling, female bodies, psycho-spiritual-geography, socio politics, urban environments and autobiography.” Gambo’s academic background in gender theory, social policy, and development studies informs her work.
There is Mous Lamrabat, a Moroccan-Belgian photographer who plays with these aspects of his identity in his work. Said Lamrabat in an interview for Emirates Women, “I see people in Morocco that are so creative everyday without even knowing they are. I hope to change the stigmas that people have about our culture.”
There is Ivan Forde, a Guyanese born and Harlem raised artist and child of the cosmos. Frode likes to experiment with combining different media, and is often interested in non-linear interpretations of time.
And finally, there is Joseph Obanubi, a Lagos-based artist who writes on his website, “my approach is mostly surreal, and provides an alternative way of seeing things.” Said Gaestel, “His work is like a layering of the dreamscape. The dreamscape is part of our experience. To make visual work that reflects that is the truth.”
Gaestel pulled up the Instagram page @lagosphotofestival to showcase these African artists further. “I want to let the works speak for themselves” Gaestel said as she displayed image after image. She noted, too, an important difference between “the kinds of portraits that Africans are making of themselves versus what we are publishing.”
When asked about the future of better journalism, Gaestel was tentatively hopeful. “I think that decolonizing journalism has to do with transitioning the power structures, with transitioning who is doing the decision making,” she said, explaining that most other fields need to go through a similar decolonizing practice. “It’s about looking at structures and frameworks, interrogating them, expanding them. Dismantling the power structures that are in place.”
Her response can sound frustratingly vague, but this vagueness is a testament to how pervasive networks of power are. Undoing the colonial consciousness built into Western thought is no simple task. However, the @lagosphotofestival Instagram is evidence of the fact that this work is well underway.
Gaestel praised the writers, editors, and media-creators who are fighting to expand the world of journalism. For her part, she is moving towards creating work that is more conceptual and lyric. “We must broaden these fields, we must broaden the conceptions of truth. In the end, I believe it will be liberating for everyone.”
Image credit: Patrick Montero via Haverford College
