The cover article by Chicago writer Alex
Kotlowitz, “Suddenly, a Terrorist?”, in the March 20 New York Times Magazine, is about a small-town Michigan restaurant owner,
Ibrahim Parlak, who had been minding his own business, making
friends, and raising a family for 13 years until July 29, when the
federal government arrested him as a suspected terrorist. It turns
out the arrest was for something that happened in his native Turkey
while Parlak was part of the Kurdish resistance movement before he
received political asylum in the United States in 1991. His many
friends were dumbfounded by the turn of events.
“How is it that two groups of
individuals — Parlak’s small-town friends and the U.S.
government — can look at one man, at one case, at one
situation, and come to such disparate conclusions?” Kotlowitz
writes. “Are his friends so close to him that they
can’t see what might have been ugliness in his past? Or is
the government so intent on proving that it’s tough
on terrorism that it has lost its moral bearing?”
The author doesn’t answer the question
directly, but he provides enough detail so that by the end of the
long article, readers have a good idea of what happened. After
9/11, the government essentially changed the rules. The same
actions that made Parlak a freedom fighter in the eyes of the
government in 1991 make him a terrorist now. The resulting
injustice is understandable, believable, and outrageous.
The magazine piece is a good example of what
Kotlowitz calls storytelling “from the ground up,” the
technique he employed so well in his acclaimed 1991 book, There Are No Children Here, which details two years in the lives of Lafeyette and
Pharoah Rivers, young brothers growing up amid the violence of the
Chicago housing projects. He interviews the unrich and unfamous,
people who have never had their stories told before. Lately
Kotlowitz has told more stories of Chicago street people in Never a City So Real (Crown,
2004).
Here we tour abandoned steelyards with 64-year-old Ed Sadlowski,
“Oil Can Eddie,” who in 1976 was in the national
spotlight as a reform candidate for president of the United
Steelworkers union and who still makes sure his union buddies get their
pension checks on time. In another chapter we meet Brenda and Millie,
inseparable old girlfriends who share a job checking up on the welfare
of young mothers and handing out diapers. “In a sense,
they’re professional busybodies,” Kotlowitz writes. They
enjoy introducing their writer friend — and, by proxy, his
readers — to neighborhood eateries and to the everyday kindnesses
that pass among the characters who inhabit Chicago’s West Side.
Earlier this month, Kotlowitz came to
Springfield as keynote speaker of the Illinois Authors Book Fair,
where he described his attempts to tell stories along the margins
of life and talked about why telling them quietly reveals larger
truths more effectively than does being shrill. And he explained
why Illinois is the best place for him to live and write.
“There’s too much shouting going
on,” Kotlowitz says of the current state of media affairs.
“Too much of current journalism is shoot-from-the hip, loud
writing with an attitude. This is the voice of writers who
don’t get out much. There’s something unengaged about
it.”
Many journalists and nonfiction authors, perhaps most of them, have an agenda of social
reform. I ask Kotlowitz whether “telling the stories of people
who don’t otherwise get their stories told” is enough to
bring about social change. “I don’t think I’m going
to change the world,” he replies, “but the power of story
is the ability to reveal lives very different from our own. My work may
take people to places they otherwise wouldn’t venture to go. It
may open some eyes and inform the conversation.”
The unpretentious Midwest, as a region of
calm between the noisy, status-seeking coasts, may be the best
place for a writer who wants to explore large themes such as
poverty and race through quiet stories of real people. This is,
after all, “the heart of the heart of America,” one
writer says. Writer and poet Dan Guillory, who lives in Findlay,
calls Illinois “the physical and spiritual center of the
country.” Twenty years ago, Kotlowitz adopted Chicago as his
home. From there, he says, “you can see all the fissures in
the landscape. It is a good perch from which to see America’s
heart and soul.”
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2005.
