Anjan Sundaram has written much lauded accounts of his time working as a journalist in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Breakup is a more personal book, set around a decade ago, when Sundaram moved to Shippagan, a tiny Canadian coastal town in New Brunswick. There, he and his wife, Nat, became parents to a little girl.
As a new father, Sundaram makes the decision to travel to the Central African Republic (CAR), to report on a developing conflict. Nat, also a former war correspondent, stays behind. The book’s title provides a spoiler for what happens next.
[ Book review: Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship by Anjan SundaramOpens in new window ]
There’s an argument as to how much interiority a journalist should bring into their work, if any at all. Is any story ever about them? Should massacres and human rights abuses be a backdrop for personal discovery?
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At the same stage, while many people know about the risks of mental health problems among journalists, less may be aware of the potential challenges when it comes to holding down relationships, maintaining other forms of consistency, or settling into what may be deemed a more “normal” life.
The feeling of covering a crisis and realising that much of the rest of the world might not care is one that is familiar to me and many other reporters
— Sally Hayden
In CAR, Sundaram does courageous work interviewing witnesses to massacre, and – along with a colleague – even stopping a massacre from taking place. But his recollections also portray him as strangely detached. Is that partly the point? That this job numbs you?
When a pharmacist tells him that people in rebel-held areas are dying from a lack of medicine, Sundaram says he is late for a meeting. He moves from talking about an assassination to watching kittens playing in a yard.
After his trip, Sundaram travels to pay respects to a dead rooster he kept as a pet in Rwanda. That overt display of mourning is a marked contrast to the postscript, which begins: “Many of the people we met on this journey died shortly afterward.”
The feeling of covering a crisis and realising that much of the rest of the world might not care is one that is familiar to me and many other reporters.
“People know more about the moon than of this war,” says local journalist Thierry to Sundaram, as they look up at the sky towards the end of their mission. It is another war, Sundaram later notes, where “no one had counted the number of dead”.
