In the age of COVID, people in vulnerable situations have not become less vulnerable. I’ve spent five years developing a network of people around the globe—my WhatsApp info gets sent around a lot. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve gotten messages from strangers in Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, and Lebanon asking me to tell their story.
When someone sends me a photo in WhatsApp, it immediately saves to my phone; like many families, ours shares a photo library. I have to be quick to delete the pictures before my daughters see them.
The charred body of the husband of a woman in Myanmar, photo evidence of what happened when the junta destroyed her village.
A toddler girl in Iraq petting a puppy as her parents, who were translators for American armed forces, tell me about the latest letter threatening to kidnap and torture them all.
Twin boys in Syria staring out the window at the rubble of a building leveled by a missile that came too close to the apartment where they’re sheltering.
I do not come to writing as a journalist with the kind of thick skin and distance I need to tell these stories objectively; I’m having to learn those skills. I still have an advocate’s instincts. And so I wrestle with what to do, how much is my responsibility.
I know—believe me, I know—that it is not my job to save the people who trust me with their stories. But I also know that I can serve as a mediator. A listener who passes along what I hear. A megaphone shouting into the noise. All of us can.
The desperation of the people I connect with through my writing only seems to have ratcheted up as COVID sweeps through refugee camps and asylum-seekers’ shanty towns, as worldwide economic insecurity affects people without papers the hardest. In the US, I’m glad President Biden has announced new initiatives to rebuild the resettlement program and reform unjust immigration practices, but it will be years or decades before our country will be able to actually institute the kinds of necessary changes that will make a difference of the lives of people who remain vulnerable while debates rage and indifference reigns.
In response to the stories I’m hearing, I’ve been pitching editors, trying to place pieces in national publications. My book, After the Last Border, came out in August; there was a flurry of publications at book launch. In the six months since, however, only two of my pitches have landed, one at Newsweek and one at CNN. I’m glad they did.
But those were two pitches out of…I don’t know how many emails I’ve sent out. Somewhere around 150 pitches, I stopped counting.
I know the reasons editors have ignored or rejected my pitches (often with a kind note, which I always appreciate). The reactive news cycle in the United States moved at a superstorm pace during the election and insurrection; the world is still in the throes of a global pandemic. As a writer, I get it. I’ve been writing too long to take it personally any more, and I counsel my students about the importance of waiting for the opportune time to tell a story.
As a person, it keeps me up at night. Injustice in the world doesn’t stop or start based on what the US news cycle cares about on any given day. Displaced people are still scrambling or fleeing or dying. This is something I see firsthand, even if only over WhatsApp or FaceTime currently.
I started this newsletter last August as an extension of the kind of writing I’ve been doing; I pictured it like the B-side of records where artists put songs that didn’t quite make the main cut. But in the early fall, book launch events and podcasts took over; my kids needed me as tech support and teachers’ aid while we were starting virtual school. The election, and then the lonely holidays and the insurrection and the inauguration, took up an outsized amount of emotional and writing energy. And I was pitching with a kind of justice-bent rage fueling me—I wanted someone, somewhere to just listen to what the people who were reaching out to me were enduring.
Despite the fact that I’ve had dozens of people sign up in the last six months (thank you!!), this newsletter fell by the wayside, but I finally have the time and space to really dig in. I have a new long-term project I’ll tell you about soon (I’m obsessed) and it’s giving shape to the next few years of my work. As part of that, I want a place where I can do the kind of writing that I think needs to be done, without pitching and waiting for editorial approval, about injustice happening right now around the world.
That’s why I’m relaunching “The Injustice Report.”
I’m going to begin with an in-depth series about Myanmar. I wrote about the history of the country in ATLB and have been close friends with people from there for more than a decade. When the coup happened, I reached out to people and have more interviews lined up than I know what to do with.
For this series, which will come to your inbox once or twice a week, I’ll feature the voices of people in various places within Myanmar, using first names or pseudonyms, to give real-time updates. I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to interview the grandson of one of the most egregious leaders in the history of the country who is eager to tell his story. I’ll touch on the history of Myanmar (and why many of us still say ‘Burma’) and give some background on Aung San Suu Kyui, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and controversial leader just placed again under house arrest again by the junta. I’ll look back at George Orwell’s history there—the totalitarianism of 1984 has roots in Orwell’s time as a British Imperial Police Officer there in the 1920s, and one of my favorite nonfiction books explores that connection brilliantly. And I’ll write about my own relationship with a country that I’ve researched for more than a decade but only spent a handful of minutes in once, one summer when I was in college.
I’m going to combine my newsletter with Instagram Live interviews. Mostly I’ll ask people at the center of these stories to join me, but since I often write about people currently in danger, I’ll also interview activists and NGO workers as well. When I write, I can protect people’s identities in a way I cannot on camera, so I’ll use Insta and Substack to provide as full a picture as I can of what’s happening in Myanmar.
My first Instagram Live will be this Thursday at 5:30 CT with Dr. Salai Tun Than, an activist and former professor of agriculture who protested the Burmese tatmadaw in November 2001 alone in his academic robes in front of Yangon City Hall. He was arrested and condemned to seven years imprisonment; Amnesty International identified him as a prisoner of conscience and advocated for his release. In 2008, he came to the US as a refugee and I met him when he translated for a nonprofit I co-founded working with Burmese refugee artisans.
Dr. Salai on the right after our English class years ago; photo by Kelsi Klembara.
Dr. Salai earned advanced degrees from the Universities of Georgia and Wisconsin. He is about to turn 94—he lived through British colonialism in Burma, was educated in the segregated American South, endured persecution by the junta, and was finally driven out of the country he will always love.
No one knows more than Dr. Salai about what is at stake in Myanmar right now. Join me Thursday on Instagram Live or watch the video later under the “Injustice Report” section on my Instagram page; I’ll also share it in my next newsletter, which will come later this week.
As I launch this new series, now is an especially good time to invite people to subscribe who might be interested in receiving this mix of personal writing and international reporting in their inbox once or twice a week. After writing for the next few weeks about Myanmar, I’ll follow with other series I’m currently developing.
For now, all subscriptions are free. You can find out more about my work at jessicagoudeau.com, and on my Twitter and Instagram. And if you ever want to be in touch, I’d love to hear from you.
See you Thursday on Instagram Live, and later this week in your inbox for the first installment of “Injustice in Myanmar.”