Profiles

Mariane Pearl — The Challenge of Hope

Glamour Magazine

(November 17, 2008) Journalist and author Mariane Pearl came to international attention when her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic militants in Pakistan in 2002. She was five months pregnant at the time.

Currently based in Paris, Mariane Pearl reports on women working for social change as well as culture, science, immigration, and politics. Her book about the murder of her husband, A Mighty Heart, was made into a critically acclaimed film last year starring Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl. In June, Pearl received a 2008 Internews Media Leadership Award for her dedication to international reporting and commitment to spreading a global message of hope. She recently served on the international jury for the Internews Every Human Has Rights Awards, organized in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

While in Washington, DC in June, Pearl spoke with Annette Makino, Internews Senior VP for Communications, about the responsibilities of journalists and why, despite everything, she tells stories of hope.

Why did you become a journalist?

I think I’m fundamentally interested in the human race – in the sense that I’m also sometimes puzzled by it. A journalist always has a pretext to explore that curiosity.

I’m interested in the human need to connect, and to understand. Ignorance is not neutral – it creates repercussions. It is becoming more and more dangerous to be narrow in our view, to deny the other’s reality. We saw in America with 9/11 that regardless of your will, the world is still going to come to you.

Imijphoto.com Internews Senior VP for Communications Annette Makino, right, interviewed journalist Mariane Pearl when she was in Washington, DC to be honored at the Internews Media Leadership Awards in June 2008

How do you see the role of a journalist?

Journalism is one profession that holds so much power, you can easily lose track of its purpose.

As we drift apart, our job is to remind people of their commonality. It’s easy to report on differences; it takes a lot more work to report the other kinds of stories. But this is not a luxury any more.

The truth of the matter is that you have to have a lot of self-control to be a good journalist. It takes great personal work, and humility. As journalists, there should be a moment when we stop asking other people questions and start asking ourselves questions.

For your Global Diaries series for Glamour and for your 2007 book, In Search of Hope: The Global Diaries of Mariane Pearl, you have profiled inspiring women from around the world. How do you approach this work?

Story-telling is such a powerful way to convey our commonality despite all our differences. I’ve interviewed women from the North Pole to the South, from presidents to cleaning ladies. I come to them with respect and the willingness to really listen.

You’d be surprised at how many journalists don’t know how to listen. It’s in that effort that you find true meaning, true joy and satisfaction.

What have you learned from the women you’ve interviewed?

You find hope in places where people have to fight for it. I profiled a young Ugandan woman whose mother died of AIDS because she could not afford to pay for both anti-retroviral drugs and her daughter’s school tuition; the daughter is now at Harvard studying to become a doctor… I profiled a Colombian woman who organized a children’s movement to vote for a ceasefire to the violence there… These people have hope because they have meaning. They don’t confuse hope with light-heartedness.

What is hope? What is peace? It’s not a static state; it’s a constantly moving process. That’s why monks pray all day. It’s a muscle you have to exercise daily.

This work requires a lot of education and understanding of hope, and of happiness. These people I’ve interviewed seem happier to me than those who don’t have that challenge.

After Danny was killed, people really responded to your ability to rise above hatred and anger. In the face of everything you have gone through, how have you remained hopeful?

I knew anger was a dead end. I knew depression was a dead end. I had to go the hard way, the path of tolerance and hope. That was also Danny’s way

I don’t think I’m even a hopeful person by nature. I just know the nature of what I’m dealing with. And hope is my answer. At the end of the day, you take an angry person and a hopeful person – the hopeful person is the stronger person.

The man who masterminded the plot to kill Danny, Omar Sheikh, has a son about two months older than mine. We’re both going to die some day, and when we go, he’s going to leave behind no hope – and where there’s no hope, there’s no life.

Our work is much harder than any terrorist’s work. They use fear—we know and understand how that works.

Promoting tolerance is not a nice easy thing – at least, it’s not easy for me! I’m in training for that every day.

The terrorists have very clear values, and they are willing to die for them. We need people willing to die for the ideal of hope. Yes, it’s scary. But what is scarier than a life with no meaning?

Mariane Pearl’s next projects include producing a documentary with the working title of Antidote, featuring five of the women she has profiled; writing a memoir of her Cuban family; and writing freelance personal features.

VIDEO: Mariane Pearl's speech at the 2008 Internews Media Leadership Awards

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