Journalism - The Most Beautiful Practice in the World

By Khalifa Abo Khraisse

Directorial

We cannot greet with our problems last year, but new year's celebrations allow us to make sure that even our troubles have left with him. It's a symbolic gesture, like we're burying an empty crate. We even allow ourselves the luxury of feeding a ray of hope, signing a contract with the future, fixing goals, making well - intentioned promises.

In Tripoli no ceremonial passage was noticed between the end of a cycle and the start of a young man. It was a night like all the others, a lonely night in which Tripoli looked even sader. We don't often have a party. The last one happened to me a few months ago, and I canceled, since, ironically, it was a farewell party.

I hate prolonged goodbyes, and farewell parties are the longest way to say goodbye. Besides, I don't consider farewell to the people I love, an ocasia deserving to be celebrated. Therefore, a few days before my return to Tripoli, I went to the editorial work of the magazine “Internasional” to apologize because I had asked to cancel an organized holiday to greet me. To be perfectly honest, I was afraid of being moved too much. I didn't want to stop crying, since the first article of the male universal code is unwritten, they say men can weep publicly, only in football matches. And yet, they made me cry anyway.

It happened when I was leaving the office. They surprised me with a gift. At that moment, I discovered what is one of the advantages of being a friend of great journalists: they use their skills to find the right gift for you. I had fallen into an emotional ambush.

If you're lucky to visit their headquarters, the first thing you notice is the bell. There's a little blue adhesive that says “Internasional”: After ringing the bell, you'll feel like you're looking at a special issue of the magazine.

Once you enter, following the colorful walls, you will begin answering with a smile, smiling faces on your right. Smiles are really contagious in these halls, and you can't not trade them. Yeah, they're cute, but they don't just stand in line to greet you: they fix the walls behind your back, which hang the pages of the next issue of the magazine. They're going through in a row, ahead of final approval.

Gabriel Garçia Marquez called him the most beautiful profession in the world of journalism. He wrote: "No one who was born for journalism and who is not ready to die for it could resist such an unintelligible and unfathomable profession, whose work ends after any news, do you think it ends forever, and leaves you no quiet moment until you resume, with more enthusiasm than ever, after a minute”

As I watched them work, I remembered someone else's words: “This trade only makes you feel”. They're words that perfectly explain the price of living “for him and only for him”. Journalism shares several aspects of crafts and other obsessions, such as literature, pictures, photographs, and records. All are characterized by isolation and loneliness, a welcome necessary to the god of creativity. There are differences. Most important is that journalism is not a wild hunt for beauty but truth, and beauty and truth do not always go hand in hand. Thus, the journalist's work may be even more lonely.

Reset

It's strange: one moment you feel connected, open, inspired and aware of everything, and right after that you break down and disappear. While you're working, you fall in love with what you're doing. You give all your love and attention, to abandon him when you're done. There's a special love you have to break up with twice: once you've finished your job, and another time, finally, when you publish it. And at that point, it starts from the beginning.

This trade only makes you feel” are the words Alessandra Beltrame told me by telling me about the movie she was making. He's shooting at 8mm and doing it alone. Alessandra and I met in Bergamo. Besides doing movies and experimenting with music, during the day he works in a specialised laboratory for the recovery and evaluation of footage coming from family archives, with the objective of transferring to digital forms. Gene, restore and collect all these old treasures.

It has managed to find old footage originating from Libya, in particular from Tripoli. When he told me, I wanted to see them immediately. Seeing them took me whole, I felt homesick about an era I had never lived with. I'm working on a project on the same subject, reading and seeing a lot of materials, but I never expected Tripoli's most beautiful card waiting for me in Bergamo. She was happy, most of all when she realized how much I had liked that little private design.

I have seen this special love for the profession in the eyes of some journalists and photographers who worked in Libya. They continue to come back here, in a very hostile country to them, where a type of “of iron” is created in the Libyan version, a system for censorship of information and control of journalists. Because they cannot intimidate foreign journalists with the same methods that scare locals, they try to control them in other ways.

They try to limit what they can see, the places and times to go, and that even before they arrive, when they ask for a visa. Visa request for journalists must be sealed by the Foreign Press Department, and it takes a long time before this office decides who can enter the country, and who can not.

When they arrive, they have to go to the office to get work permits. But even with that permit, they have sometimes had to spend several hours in custody because they encountered the wrong militia at the wrong time. They are alone, since often their embassies are not dying of a desire to help. Likely, middlemen and translators working with them refer their movements to the department. The main hotels where they stay, Radisson Blue Hotel or Haroon, are swarming with the functionaries of the same department.

Yet, none of this has stopped them, always finding a way. I know for sure, since they recently replaced the head of the foreign press department and have become even more strict. Doing certain tasks requires spending many hours alone, away from friends and family. Long days and even longer nights. And the last thing you think about when you go to bed is the first thing you think in the morning when you wake up. It's a special love, but when the job gets well, the reward is huge.

Then, one of the advantages of being a friend of big journalists is that they will use their skills to find the right gift for you. Since my return to Tripoli I have always carried the gift, it has been very helpful and a very good companion, but this is another story. / International The world..