Transcript:
ZAKARIA: Andrew Solomon is one of the most acute observers of our time. He's traveled the world, writing beautifully for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and many other places; won the National Book Award for his penetrating look at depression; and won a National Book Critic Circle award for his look at the challenges facing the disabled and other disadvantaged groups.
His
latest offering, Far and Away, is a
collection of essays from his decades of witnessing historic change – the
twilight of the Soviet Union, the turmoil of post-9/11 Afghanistan, the tyranny
of Gadhafi in Libya.
Andrew
Solomon, pleasure to have you on.
ANDREW
SOLOMON, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: What a pleasure to be here.
ZAKARIA:
You’ve been reporting for 25 years, traveling for 25 years. You talk about
travel as a kind of moral imperative.
SOLOMON:
It’s really drawn from the uprise of xenophobia in the country at large right
now. I think that people have a very difficult time making sense of countries
they've never visited. People have a very difficult time conceptualizing places
that they don’t know.
I feel
like, if every young person in the world were required to spend two weeks in a
foreign country before they reached full adulthood – doesn’t matter what
country; doesn’t matter what they did there – half the world’s diplomatic
problems would be gone. So many of them arise out of the fact that people don’t
understand what is specific to my culture, what is universal.
ZAKARIA:
You’ve traveled to places that we think of as very scary, like the Middle East,
and you approach it really as an author and an intellectual, not as an expert
in the Middle East. So what I’m interested in is how do you react to, you know,
the general feeling, “Oh, my god, that place is just full of chaos and
violence, bloodshed and despair?”
SOLOMON:
I think that, in every one of these societies, there is a large body of people,
who are probably the people who watch this program, who are intelligent,
thinking people, interested in and engaged with the situation of their own
country and the world, and that those people are often neglected.
I
started off writing about artists and going to various countries and meeting
artists. Partly, I was writing about art, but more I was writing about these
engaged people. And it’s been my mission ever since then to go to places we
find scary and to find the human stories of people, articulate people, with a
point of view, and say, this is what it is. Afghanistan is not, contrary to
what people had heard, a country of corrupt bureaucrats and warlike peasants.
There are a lot of other people there.
ZAKARIA:
For you, Libya was in some ways the – heartbreaking, to watch that country
descend? Explain why.
SOLOMON:
I was in Libya in the late Gadhafi period. And life under Gadhafi was worse
than you can possibly imagine. It was a ridiculous place. It was unbelievably
stressful. There was nothing to be said for the system that existed. But I made
the mistake of thinking that, if they got rid of that system, which was so
awful, that something better would have to rise in its place.
And
what happened instead is that it went into a state of complete chaos, so that
even the patriotic Libyans I met when I was there have mostly tried to flee if
they possibly can.
Many
people make the mistake of thinking that democracy and justice are the natural
default state, and if you remove all of the impediments to those qualities,
that is what will rise up. And what I learned, sort of, as a personal lesson in
dealing with Libya, having argued that we should support the attacks against
Gadhafi, is that the natural state to which people default is not democracy and
is not order but is a terrifying, violent, brutal chaos.
ZAKARIA:
It’s a very difficult thing for Americans to understand because America has
always had order, inheriting it from, I think, the British colonies, you know.
You look at Brazil. Brazil is a country that was, when you were looking at it,
struggling to create a functioning democracy. In fact, even now the struggle
continues with these recent proceedings, the impeachment of the president.
What
did you learn from that experience?
SOLOMON:
I was fascinated in Brazil by the relationships between the classes. You know,
in many places, in most places really, the wealthy live in an enclosed area,
and the poor live in outlying areas. And the points of contact are relatively
minimal.
Rio de
Janeiro has a physical structure in which the wealthy live in the flat areas,
and the poor have accumulated in the favelas, in the hills that rise above
those areas. I was interested in what happens when everyone is put together. I
was interested that so many of the Brazilians I met, of privilege, wanted to
take on characteristics they associated with the favelas, the intensity, the
music, the relationship to football that so many models have come out of there.
And I
loved what Regina Case, who is, sort of, the Oprah Winfrey of Brazil, said to
me. She said, “I’ve been in North America. You have a pine grove here; you have
oak trees there.” She said, “In Brazil” – she said, “Have you been to our
tropical rainforest? Everything is growing on top of everything else; the
sunlight is being choked out, and there's still more happening than anywhere
else. And just as our rainforest is making the oxygen the world needs to
breathe, so this social structure creates a social oxygen of intimacy from
which the rest of the world could profit.”
ZAKARIA:
What are the places that – that haunt you, that remain in your memory now?
SOLOMON:
I’m certainly haunted by Afghanistan. I went there thinking it would be a
punishing assignment, and when I got there, I fell in love with the place. I’ll
always remember walking with my translator one day. I had bought one of those
little fur hats like the ones Karzai always wore. And we were walking back
through a crowded market at a time when most foreigners were either U.N. or military
and weren’t allowed to walk in those areas.
And
Faruk (ph), my translator, said, “Why don’t you put on your hat?”
And I
said, “Oh, I think, you know, going native always looks a little bit silly.”
And he
said, “No, come on. Put on your hat.”
So, I
said, “All right.”
And I
put on the hat and suddenly everyone around us burst into applause. And I didn’t
know what was happening. And one of the people stepped forward and he said, “You’re
an American; you’re a foreigner, but you’re in the market with us. You are
wearing a true Afghan hat. We all want you to know that you’re welcome here.”
It was difficult not to fall in love with that.
ZAKARIA:
What do you think of Putin’s Russia? Or is it even fair, from the way you look
at a country, to call it Putin’s Russia?
SOLOMON:
Oh, I think it is fair to call it Putin’s Russia. I wish it weren’t fair. I
think that it’s been a terrible tragedy to see Russia revert to the kind of
autocracy that it was in its much darker days. There are some freedoms that exist
now that didn't exist when I first went there at the end of the Soviet Union,
but there was a kind of blissful idealistic notion of where everyone was
headed, and none of it has come to pass.
ZAKARIA:
Do you look at America differently? Have these travels made you look at your
own country differently?
SOLOMON:
Travel is always both a window and a mirror. So part of what you do is to
discover the other place and part of what you do is to see yourself and your
own country differently.
I’ve
come to understand that, while we have a great many freedoms in the United
States, there are freedoms that exist elsewhere that don’t exist here. And I’ve
come to understand that we take for granted many things that give people much
greater joy when they’ve had to fight for them. And I’ve come to understand
that American policy around the world has an enormous effect on the minutia of
people’s day-to-day lives and that what we think of as sweeping decisions that
are made on a broad scale in economic or military or even citizen-to-citizen
terms have much more grave consequences than we often realize.
ZAKARIA:
Andrew Solomon, pleasure to have you on.
SOLOMON:
Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
