Exiled

I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to blink and waste a single moment of looking at the beach and the Pacific. I had never seen an ocean. If I could set up a tent on the sand, I thought, I could stay there forever. I have loved the seas, rivers, and oceans since I studied…

It’s been almost a month since I arrived in the United States. Oddly, I haven’t felt homesick or strange here even though this is my first time ever outside Iraq. I was born in Baghdad in 1986. I never lived anywhere else. Baghdad is where my father and mother were born, fell in love, and…

I’m finally in America. I lived all of my 23 years in Baghdad, never even traveling outside Iraq, but now I am in Tucson, Arizona, to begin a new life. I’m still trying to understand my feelings–missing the streets of Baghdad and the comfort of my family, but enjoying the sense that I can go about…

From his prison cell, veteran Chinese journalist Jiang Weiping wrote a poem to his daughter, Jennifer, which included the lines: “Though the road home has many twists and turns / Your daddy believes that we will be reunited soon.” She was little more than 10 years old when he was imprisoned in 2000 for reporting…

This week, as CPJ finalized its annual list of journalists imprisoned for their work, my thoughts turned to Eritrea and this photo. Taken in 2000, near the end of a two-year border war with neighboring Ethiopia and during the heyday of a burgeoning private press movement in Africa’s youngest nation, the photo shows the staff…