FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
Off’s book reads like a thriller
“Journalists have their best moments when others have their worst.”
So says Carol Off, host of CBC Radio’s evening flagship program As It Happens, and it was just such a moment in 2002 that helped launch her award-winning media career.
A prize-winning TV documentary on Afghanistan’s treacherous warlords — close allies of convenience in the NATO-led effort against the Taliban — won her professional accolades but put the family of her main source for that story in mortal danger.
What followed was Off ’s crossing of the ethical line that separates a journalist from the story being covered — going from detached professional journalist, disinterested in the consequences of exposing wrongdoing, to “getting involved in the lives” of those needed to tell the story, and doing so “as a human being.”
The result, Off told moderator Jessica Sartori and about 50 book lovers at a BookFest Windsor session Saturday, was an eight-year struggle to bring Asad Aryubwal and his family to Canada as refugees. That frustratingly long effort is documented in All We Leave Behind, currently nominated for a Governor General’s Award for literature and a Writers’ Trust Award.
Believing the promises of the just-arrived foreigners that they were in his country to bring peace and better lives for the local population, Off said Aryubwal, unlike so many others living in fear, was willing to risk his life to speak out and warn Canadians they were “unwittingly getting involved with the wrong people.”
Canada sacrificed 158 soldiers and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghanistan on a doomed international effort Off describes as having created a failed state.
Written in the first person, Off ’s book reads like a thriller.
“I learned what it is to be a refugee — anybody who thinks it’s easy, doesn’t know,” the author told her Capitol Theatre audience.
The suspense continues through the story, even though the reader knows from the start that the Aryubwals will eventually be among those very lucky but very few of global refugees who make it to Canada to start over.
Off was there to greet them at Toronto’s airport at the end of 2015, when Asad, a proud Afghan man of honour who had protected Off and her crew on visits to Afghanistan — sheltering them from constant threats they only learned about much later — was finally able to let go after years of suffering.
“I felt his fear, anxiety, humiliation, rage, frustration, delight and sorrow as he sobbed and sobbed,” Off wrote of that airport scene following a long, long waiting game “deliberately” put in place by Canada and other countries to discourage the desperate.
Off said Asad Aryubwal changed her life. For journalists, she said, it’s still “get in, get the story, and get out.” As for when to cross that line, “I don’t think I’ve worked it entirely through yet,” she said.
Literature lovers had the opportunity to cosy up to other journalists among the 25 authors at this year’s 16th BookFest Windsor, which ran Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Festival chair Sarah Jarvis said the number of invited guests was lower than in previous years in a deliberate move to provide the writers with “more airtime” with audiences.
Windsor, said Jarvis, is “a crazy book town” with at least five local publishers and a raft of literary events and gatherings.
Local publisher Dan Wells said BookFest, where his company Biblioasis set up to sell the written product of the invited writers, “kicks off the Christmas sales season.” For the publishers of new books, Wells said about 70 per cent of annual sales happen between October and December.