Transcriber: Rafa Alba Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Well, I can say I definitely don't deserve that.
You know, having been a journalist for so long,
now I'm being put in the -
standing in front of people
rather than getting to talk to them and interview them,
and I feel much more comfortable doing that, I have to say - speaking.
There's a reason I'm a writer.
It's because I don't speak all that well.
But it's a pleasure to join you all.
It's so funny to come back to Oklahoma
and to think of just how many places I've been since January -
just the past three months.
From Baghdad to Beirut,
to Cairo, to Libya,
and then back to Oklahoma.
I walked out of that airport yesterday,
and I felt that great Oklahoma heat
and the wind,
and I knew I was home.
And it felt good to be home, I have to say.
I said last night -
I was speaking at the Oklahoma City Memorial -
you know, home becomes more important
when you fear you might not get to go back to it.
So it is a pleasure to join you all today.
I don't have all that long,
and I'm kind of excited to talk about
what I think you all were expecting to hear,
which is the Arab world,
American democracy
and the moment we're about to embrace.
I have to say I've spent a career being pessimistic
or thinking things were not headed in the right direction.
For the first time, in my career at least,
I think they are headed in the right direction.
And I want to start this conversation off -
you know, I was sitting - as was mentioned -
I was sitting in detention in Libya just a couple of weeks ago.
I was sitting in a jail cell,
in the basement.
It's funny - when you imagine a jail cell, this is exactly what it looked like.
It had a very high ceiling,
graffiti on the wall.
There was a bottle in the corner for us that basically served as our bathroom,
and we had a bowl of rice.
You know, I thought it was almost a cliché,
as we sat on these tattered mattresses,
thinking that we were going to be here for a long, long time.
You know, I thought about - that moment really struck me.
I think part of me wanted to regret what I do as a foreign correspondent,
but I never really quite did.
And I did think back over, you know,
over what I've been doing for the past 10 or 15 years.
To me, the antidote to violence,
the antidote to conflict,
is a shared sense of universal values,
is a notion that we all, you know, to be very basic about it -
it sounds very basic, but it's hard when you try to execute it in journalism -
the sense that we all are human.
There's a humanity that bonds us together.
In Baghdad,
I tried to write about conflict as a background narrative,
as white noise in a way,
and make the stories about people:
about a mother sending her son off to fight,
about a father who had lost his son in a bombing.
I did that in Lebanon as well.
And last year,
I was sitting in Baghdad again,
a place I've spent more time than any other place,
and I was looking at this wreckage from a bombing.
And I was sitting there with my notebook,
and as we do as reporters,
I was trying to say "Look for details that will somehow make this different,
somehow make this stand out."
And after 10 minutes of staring at this scene,
it became so frustrating to me
because I realised that nothing was distinct about this.
Nothing distinguished this scene.
Many people here probably have had that feeling,
the "another bombing in Baghdad."
I realised that in some ways,
I couldn't even try to reclaim the humanity
of what had happened before me
because it had become so mundane in a way, so repetitive.
The change undergoing - that's going on now in the Arab world -
is going to be protracted conflict.
It's going to be tragic at times.
It's going to be brutal.
I think what we see in Libya is something we'll see in other countries perhaps,
in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.
But I have to say the flipside of that and why I feel so optimistic right now,
why I want to get back to work in a lot of ways -
even after what happened -
is that we're on the verge of a moment
that I think that is more spectacular
than any moment in the Arab world since World War I.
And I think this moment that we're about to embark on
promises to redefine our relationship between America and the Arab world,
it promises to redefine the Arab world,
and it promises to redefine the world,
you know, the world at some very fundamental level.
In some respects, we've been at war with the Middle East for 10 years,
since September 11.
You can make that argument that it's even been longer than that.
War creates misunderstandings.
You know, conflict creates violence, obviously.
I'm saying kind of clichés here,
but there's something that is very dehumanizing
about, I think, what's been going on for the past 10 years.
And I think it's dehumanizing on both levels,
both for Americans and for Arabs.
What makes me so optimistic,
what makes me so hopeful,
was that right before I got to Libya and ended up in that jail cell in Sirte,
I was covering Egypt.
I was covering Tahrir Square.
And for the first time in my career,
first time in my life,
I felt that I was almost witnessing an epiphany in some ways.
And let me talk about that just a little bit if I can.
It's hard to describe how momentous it feels
when you have a million people
in one not all that big of a geographic terrain -
I mean it's a city square -
and a million people there
who are together trying to imagine a different country.
And that power of imagination -
I think you could almost write a book about imagination in the Arab world.
Going back to World War I,
imagining Arab nationalism, political Islam,
this way we imagine our identities and cultures and societies
and the states we want to build.
What you had here are mostly young people,
people using social media,
people watching Al Jazeera,
which is a force for change in the Arab world right now.
You had people trying to imagine or come up with an imagined Cairo,
an imagined Egypt,
and they were telling a government that basically hated them
that they were better
than that government had portrayed them for so long.
Streets were cleaned every morning,
when you go to Tahrir Square.
Hospitals were set up, pharmacies were run,
security was organized,
and people were treated with respect,
they were treated humanely.
You walked in, it was like walking into a different world.
I spent the night there in Tahrir Square once
because I was so taken by this moment -
the power of imagination
and the power of people to come up with a society they wanted to be part of.
But it was almost like crossing a border:
you left an old Cairo,
a Cairo that had been immiserated
by decades of dictatorship and authoritarianism,
and you entered a new Cairo,
and that was the imagined Cairo.
That power of that idea -
of Arabs, of Egyptians, of Tunisians, of Libyans,
of anyone else saying,
"We're going to reclaim our destiny.
We're going to reclaim our narrative.
We're going to set out
to establish and build a society that we want to live in" -
is, I think, is revolutionary.
I think it is a revolution that's going on right now.
This very notion of identity is changing,
and this is what gives me so much hope.
I'd spent so much time in Baghdad, in Iraq,
where identities have become ever smaller:
Are we Sunnis? Are we Shiites? Are we Kurds?
I'm the bureau chief in Lebanon,
where you have 18 different religious sects and ethnicities
and everyone identifies themselves along those sectarian and ethnic lines.
In a country of 4 million, you have - imagine that - 18 different groups
and each group has a handful of adherents,
but that identification by this religious sect
determines your ideology, your politics,
how you're portrayed, how people portray you.
It's suffocating in some ways and claustrophobic.
What you had in Egypt was like a reinterpretation of this,
a reimagination of this in some ways,
that our identity is not going to be smaller,
but rather going to be broader.
As Americans, it sounds almost, kind of, elemental,
almost matter of fact,
but it really is revolutionary
because people in that square in Tahrir
were saying:
"We're going to be citizens,
and we have rights that are due us as citizens,
and a government has to respect us as citizens.
We're not Sunni or Christian or ..."
Granted, Egypt has a very deep sense of national identity.
But what struck me at that moment -
and I've never seen in the Arab world before -
was "Our identity is going to be broader rather than smaller."
I think you can look at all these conflicts we've seen,
even before September 11 until now,
in Iraq, elsewhere,
is a question of identity in some ways,
an inability to create or forge a broader identity,
and here it's happening in Egypt.
As I was talking to my colleagues in Libya,
we talked a lot about this:
was it worth doing what we're doing?
I told them I was thinking about maybe -
actually it was very serious -
I've always wanted to have a nursery, a plant nursery,
instead of journalism.
Somebody else said
he was going to go fishing for a year or two on his boat.
We all came up with ideas,
but then I realized that as bad as it was
and as lonely as it felt
and as much guilt as we felt
over what we had done to our friends and family and people,
I think there's maybe a counter-narrative to that
or something else.
I'm also living at a time that I think is inspirational,
and it's remarkable to me
how much I want to get back to see this moment unfold.
I'm going back to Lebanon next week and to go to Egypt from there
because I think for the first time in all of our lives,
in a region, in a relationship that's caused so much hardship,
caused so much violence and so much bloodshed,
this relationship between America and the Arab world
is about to change forever.
And as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent,
the chance to be able to witness that,
try to bring meaning to it,
to be there in some respects
is something that's hard for me to imagine otherwise.
And I do think Libya was a suggestion of how difficult this is going to be.
It is going to be bloody;
it is going to be protracted.
But I think also that hope that we saw in Tahrir Square,
the hope that we saw in Tunisia
when a young man immolated himself and started a revolution,
I think that hope is so overwhelming and so powerful and so irreversible
at this point
that we're about to embark on a much better world.
That gives me a lot of optimism.
I appreciate you taking your time and listening to my ramblings,
but good to join you.
(Applause)