It’s a total immersion thing, this interviewing and then writing about people. I don’t know any other way of doing it. And I’m drained afterwards, if also a little exhilarated at finishing it. I live what they tell me they have lived. And then, I forget them (though some not entirely), it has to be so, or there wouldn’t be room for the next one and the next. But no, perhaps it’s not a forgetting exactly more a squirrelling away.
I don’t like forgetting. It’s important to hold people, to keep them in sight. Even those who are strangers to us. We need to remember, to keep thinking of them. Like those men caught by the Russians, like all those in war-torn places like Ukraine, like Somalia, like Afghanistan and on and on. And those people who are threatened with being sent to Rwanda. My heartbreaks. Can it really be so?
