On
Christmas eve in 2003, we drove into Baghdad together. His first
marriage was failing, and he spent that long night in Iraq's western
desert speaking of his daughter, Laila, and of the Iraq story, both of
which he loved in different ways. He felt ineluctably that he could not
leave that story at a crucial time. It was a commitment shouldered
without arrogance but with a clear -- and in my opinion, correct --
assessment that if he didn't tell the stories he was telling, no one
would.
That commitment awed and inspired us all. Readers saw it
in his dispatches from Iraq over more than a decade. Colleagues saw it
in Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank, Libya, and countless other places. He
was devoted to better coverage of the Arab world. He lived that devotion
in his own writing, about which nothing need be said because it so
authoritatively speaks for itself, but also in the countless invisible
acts he did to make the work of others better. He shared contacts with
novice reporters he just had met. He took hours to mentor strangers and
friends alike, about brief dispatches or sprawling book projects. He was
the least selfish reporter I ever met, and he was the one who had the
most to share, which he did compulsively.
I am not alone when I
say I wanted to be more like Anthony Shadid, in my approach to people,
to stories, to the region that was his destiny and which became my own
focus. The people he wrote about were never subjects. They each were a
world, in which he became engrossed for the entirety of the length of
his relationship to them, whether it lasted an hour or a year. In Iraq,
he taught me history. In Lebanon, as we criss-crossed the front lines in
the 2006 war, he showed me what courage looks like. I drove him
around the border, where he translated the conversations we had with
people. At one point, alone on an exposed ridge, we heard a steady
patter of mortar shells, each one closer to us than the next. We
realized we weren't approaching somebody else's front line; we alone
were the targets. "What do you think?" he said, unhurriedly. "Should we
go?" I answered by running back to the car. Anthony, as always, was full
of grace.
Shadid holding Athina Cambanis / Thanassis Cambanis
We all know how he brought that grace to the stories
of people at war and in revolt across the Arab world. Soon, when the
book he had labored over for half a decade is released next month, we
might learn how he applied that delicacy to the tale of his ancestral
home in Marjayoun. He lovingly rebuilt the manse on a hill overlooking
the Hula Valley, and in the process fell in love anew with his wife
Nada. With Marjayoun and Nada, Anthony opened a new chapter in
happiness, which blossomed on his face when he was with them or with his
daughter Laila.
With same mix of humility, inquisitiveness and
contagious enthusiasm, he invited me to join him at one of his first
olive harvests. We carted the fruit of his two trees to a next-door
village, and peered like little boys into the turbines that crushed them
into oil. He carried the blue plastic vats of oil over the threshold of
his stone house grinning like a groom.