Living Interesting Lives: Daily Life Amidst Coup D’etat and Revolution

THIS IS AN UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

Hello, I'm John Milewski, and this is Wilson Center NOW, a production of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to a special guest joining me today.

And I'm really looking forward to talking to you about your book. Our guests are Marina Ottaway, a fellow at the Wilson Center for Middle East Program. Marina, formerly served as head of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Also with us, David Ottaway. David is a fellow with the Wilson Center's Middle East program as well, and he formerly served as the Washington Post's Middle East correspondent.

Additionally to all that work, this dynamic duo has written this book. It's called Living Interesting Lives, a memoir. It's one of several you've coauthored together and quite are quite the team. And so, you know, you've written a lot of books about serious issues, but they haven't been about your own lives. Where did the idea for this book emerge?

Friends and family asking questions. And, you know, you learn about the various aspects of our life and you reply and then they say you should really write it all down. And in fact, the reaction we got from a friend in Italy last summer when he read the book and he said, I finally know who you are. I feel like I know you better.

Certainly after reading the book. Any resistance, did you think? I know it's not a book or warm up to the idea? I had started earlier doing a well. I called it Third World Postcards because I was going back to the countries where I had lived that were particularly interesting or where I'd spent a lot of time covering stories.

And I'd gotten through three, three countries Algeria, Egypt and yeah, and Bosnia. And and then the the Arab world exploded with the uprisings of 2011. So I dropped that whole project. But I started thinking about all these places where we lived, and I found it pretty interesting. And the rediscovering it that way. There's a book there. Well, well, you know, I introduced you as coauthors, but I don't want to sell short your sons.

Yes. You know, the book says the Ottawa family is the authors of David, Eric and Robyn. How did you come up with the division of labor of who wrote what? Well, it's interesting because we you know, when we write the books together, usually we edit each other's, you know, we divide it up and then we added each other that work.

But then we discovered that on a memoir that you cannot edit the that because it is a memoir, it's what you remember. And so so we decided to write it as two separate voices. As you have noticed, when you are on the same on each country, we have my take and we have David speak. And then we started thinking, not too.

Why not asking kids to do the same thing? Yeah. Yeah. How it affected them. Sure, sure. And we'll get into that a little more. But I'm also wondering, you know, you talk about you can edit someone's memoir because that's their memory. I can't tell you how many times I've been at a family gathering where I'm in an argument with a brother or sister or someone about the details of what we both think we remember accurately.

So who was the editor in chief was there? Now, if we did that, are some of these kids know? But there are some discrepancies in the book. When our memory is different. We left them as two different you know, we left the discrepancy rather than trying to get into, you know, am I right or wrong? You write them because what you remember is what you remember.

Yeah. So in the Amazon write up says it reflects on the strange normalcy of daily life in the midst of coup d'etat and revolutions. And we were talking about this a little bit before we began recording. When you're living your life, it's just your life, right? You don't wake up every day thinking, Wow, this is extraordinary. And that's why both children said that they lived perfectly normal childhoods, which they did not.

Nothing normal about this. But they chose their perception because it was the only childhood they knew. It also speaks to how adaptive kids are, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so more from Amazon. The memoir brings to light how various family members process the same events in different ways with children remembering normal and happy childhood, although their parents remember extremely challenging living conditions.

So how worried were you when you were raising these kids and moving around to these various spots, some of which were in the midst of violent uprisings? What was daily life like? Did you live with the constant sense of danger or it become normal for you as well? No, no. You know, things are never as bad when you are living through them, except in extreme cases.

Yeah. But it's worse if you are outside the country reading about it. I mean, Sadat was assassinated and David was there. But the fact is that after Assad was assassinated, not Sadat was assassinated. Life went on perfectly normal in Egypt. The next day people went to work. Yeah. Yeah. Not they did not go to work because they declared that everything.

They shouted everything down. But they went out to the promenading along the banks of the Nile because the sun was out. Another thing that the book illustrates is how much life has changed on the technological level. boy. And David, could you talk a bit about your experience as a correspondent filing stories in some of these environments? Took a lot of time doing their work.

This is before the time of of, you know, information technology. There was no there were there were no it was really difficult to make a telephone call. And we didn't very seldom did it. My only because you weren't doing it with a cell phone, you were doing no cell phones. There were no cell phones. And my main tool of communications with the outside world was a telex machine.

Which one of your spies describe as, you know, being a giant? Well, it was also very small. Some of the time we had it in the house and some of the time I had to go down to the central post office and and bribe the guy to let me cut the tape, because you have to cut a tape.

And the tape goes through the machine after you've done it. But that whole, you know, the whole process of filing took hours where now you can, you know, get on the telephone or dictated on the phone or whatever. Back then, you had to the only thing was a telex. It sounds so primitive Now, when you think about the way we could communicate, really, you know, when you were designing the cover.

You know, we gave every person something that reflects what they were doing and I had thought originally that would be nice to have David and Nicholas tickertape, except that nobody knew was a tape. He has no use to go to the Smithsonian American History or something like that. So what about the communication from your end to where he's gallivanting around covering different stories?

You're doing whatever the home country is. You've got kids maybe were going to school. How did you handle communication? You were out of touch for four weeks. Never for a month, but certainly for weeks at a time. It's back to the way things were. You know, when David disappeared in the depths of Angola, you don't expect to hear from him.

It did. You know. I know some of the answers to the questions I'm asking because I've read the book. But for the benefit of people watching and listening. How did you handle the kids as far as their awareness of the danger that their father was potentially in or that they were potentially in? You try to play it down.

You try to make them aware of it. Like, you know, we had a rule that started in Addis Ababa. If you hear shooting, you go to the center. There have to be interior space of the house. That's something that normally you don't teach your children, but you try to keep them a matter of factly. And if you have noticed, one of the kids write it that that it was fun actually sitting on the steps in the center of the house and playing play with Legos.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's also the resilience of children. I, I can't remember. It might be the same situation, but it's I think it was in you correct me, Ethiopia, where you were told you had to leave in two days. Yes. And one of your kids was his big concern was retrieving his marbles. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, that's amazing.

So I'm going to ask you about your most vivid memories, you know, because we can't cover the waterfront. I mean, this book is the scope is amazing. As I was saying again before we began recording, it's really also in addition to be this family memoir. It's a documentation of some of the major news stories of the late 20th century.

Sadat's assassination is one that you mentioned already. So I would like to know what your most vivid memories are when you when you look back, when you sat down to write, what were the easiest chapters to dig into? And for me, it was Ethiopia, because Ethiopia is such an extraordinary cemetery. I mean, it has a horrible political history and it's pretty horrible even right now.

But it's a country. It really is a has a civilized nation, has an ancient history and has a sense of itself. And it's a biblical country. I mean, you know, it just person. But I have written some of the golf balls and images from the gospels come back. Jesus kissing the leper, the country is full of lepers, you know, which you hear about here, but not elsewhere.

So there is this very strong sense that this is a different place or lying bed that night. That, to me is a very vivid memory. The the main Coptic cathedral was on the other side of a valley from our house in the hymn Night Services. In the Night services on all the services mixed African traditions with Christianity so that, for example, they they train them, but they also use drums and lying in bed listening to the drumming coming from the cathedral at night.

Yeah. Well, for me, it was Sadat's assassination. I mean, you say that in the book. I thank you. I wrote that. I wrote that down. And you said the most vivid, without a doubt the most riveting event I would ever witnessed firsthand in my entire career. Yeah. I mean, I was less than half a football field away from a minimum, so it was 40 yards, 50 yards and totally unexpected.

Although I happened to be watching very closely for the parade because my colleagues had said, something will happen, something will break down. You know, there's always a mess. And these parades. Well, so I was really watching very closely and saw what happened. I didn't realize what was happening immediately until we begin to hear gunshots. But and then I said, I've got to find out whether he's alive or dead.

So I ran down to the podium and the security people, they must have thought I was a diplomat or something because they just let me go. And but my first decision was when you hear shooting and you realize they're shooting at you generally, is it better to stand up or walk or lie down? You lie down. You can be trampled.

Stand up. You can be shot. Yeah. Great choice. So I decided to stand. Keep standing up because I didn't want to be trampled. So I went down to the crowd and I couldn't find Sadat. But I saw, you know, the entire government was there in the diplomatic corps, and they were they'd caught two of the guys or about seven altogether.

That caught two of the guys. And I thought they were going to tear them physically apart. I mean, things were really tense, but I couldn't find out whether he was alive or dead because they had wisdom away and Mubarak was there, who became vice president, who became president. He was getting up from under the chairs because they threw chairs on top of them, as if that was going to protect them.

And he was dusting off his cap. I didn't see it. Then there was a hole in his cap. You know where to go. The hat goes up like that. So they came very close to killing him. They really wanted to wipe up the entire government. But so. But this is something you never forget. Yeah. I mean, just hearing about it and imagining what it would be like.

You know, I'm watching the news story from afar, but it's a goosebumps. I want to go in a non-linear fashion. I just want to prompt you on some of the stories that are in the book that I found interesting. One one that I really enjoyed. Marina, Tell us about the three genders in the Arab world. Is that something that I learned very early when you were living in Algeria, when there were lines at the government offices, you had to get papers for everything and so on in that order, all the signs, but they were segregated.

There was a line for men was usually short in the line for women that went home forever. And I learned that if I stood in the line, in the men's line, nobody would challenge me because because women, European women, know that I can move. Europe is the third gender. They belong neither here nor there. So that you get away with it.

So you took full advantage of that special designation. David On a more serious note, in Rhodesia, you had to make a decision about whether or not to carry a gun as a dress, and you decided not to, but others UK reporters decided to. Yeah, there were a number of UK. Why did the Post talk about this? Were you recommended to or do it or not?

I told them the issue was was front and center for a lot of the correspondents there. Not so much the Americans, the British, but we were all together. The problem was you needed to get out from the capital and go to the farms, the white farmer, the farms, because that's where the the guerrillas were really concentrating and they were trying to drive the white farmers off their land.

And and to sort of shrink the whole white president presence that way. But you had to go on roads that were sort of back country roads and for the guerrillas, there was no way of knowing that you were a journalist or rather than a farmer, your skin was white and therefore you were you you were a possible target.

So the debate among journalism was the better to have a gun, to be able to shoot off some shots, to tell them that you were armed and therefore sort of chase hope they leave you, chase them away and hope they would leave you away or stick to your guns, that you shouldn't be armed and you were neutral and hope they saw a press sign on the car before they opened fire.

And and in my case, I wasn't going to carry a gun. I mean, there was it was but there were a number I can't remember. Were there any American correspondents there who did it? But there were some British and opponents and all the danger wasn't in the field. Some of it was on the home front. Tell us about the break ins in South Africa and how are you?

I think that the sequence is called Brutus to the rescue. Not quite, but it's Brutus. Brutus is the name of the dog we got at the time. It was extremely hot in the transition period in South Africa. And at the beginning, we kind of downplayed the because we said, this is the white population that's nervous about the transition and all these horror stories are greatly exaggerated.

Well, we had six brackets, which means that the horror stories were not totally exaggerated. And we finally decided that what left us so vulnerable is that we did not have a dog. And so I went to the we couldn't start with the puppy because it takes too long to grow. We needed to train the guard dog or at least an adult dog.

And so I went to the ASPCA and I got to the the biggest dog that I could find that did not frighten me to death because it you know, some of those dogs you will start with with a ten foot pole. But this local of the night who was big size man but he was very important. So I'm going to move to sort of a lightning round here.

I'm going to ask you some questions. And like the Newlywed Game, we'll see if you agree on the answers, diverge on the answers. And my first is best and worst decision that you made, best decision during this period. The best decision, I think, to stick in Ethiopia until the end, until we really were forced to leave because it was it was a historic period.

And I didn't feel personally threatened. And I think we made the right decision. The worst decision, which we didn't even think about then, was when we both got on this military plane going into a war zone and we had two children at home. And it was, you know, a sudden I was I had the Doyin David in Zimbabwe.

It was called Rhodesia. He got a call from the press center saying there is a plane going out to the to this the place where this massacre was taking place. And if you get to the airport in 15 minutes, you can come. And we both went. And it's only when we were up on the plane of better when the plane started coming down in the way, these plane come down in the war zone.

They come down in a very tight corkscrew way, which is happening on your insides. And then they fly for a long time under the radar and not under the radar unless you have ever if you have literally that is not a metaphor. You are literally on but under the radar. If you have never done it means just on top of the treetops.

And that and it was as if we were at that point and said, What the hell are we doing? Both of us in the same plane with two kids, I thought best and worst yet. If you can. If you agree with those, we can move on. No, no. The best decision I ever made was to become a foreign correspondent.

No, I mean, it's extraordinary life, the kinds of things that I was able to see, whether it was you know, I started really as a correspondent in Algeria when the just after they were becoming independent and the million French people were left Algiers, Algeria, in three months. And I was in the middle of that watching that. And then, you know, we were in Ethiopia when Charlie Selassie was overthrown and he was there.

They had a real revolution there. They rounded up the top aristocrats and killed them all. And it was like a European like it was like the French Revolution. But one thing after another, Sadat's assassination, the end of the Portuguese 400 years of Portuguese rule in Africa, watching the last Portuguese ship leave Angola in the midst of the country was in the midst of civil war and chaos.

So you just get to see. It's a privilege, is it? It is enough to see this extraordinary events. And what about the worst decision? Was it that harrowing plane ride? Probably, yeah, probably. It was the worst decision we ever made. We did not know we were going to a massacre, a massacre of missionaries. And so they didn't tell us what we were going to see, but they were really putting pressure on their correspondents.

To go was the best place to live. Depends what you mean. The one they enjoyed the creature comforts of South Africa, South Africa. But in terms of the experience, Ethiopia, Egypt that was amidst Egypt was a lesson in survival. All Egyptians are great. Surviving Cairo requires a certain level of effort because the city is huge scale, bustling. Well, you're talking about one of your sons who didn't want to hold your hand crossing the street except in Egypt.

And not for fear, you know. But yeah, but in Cairo, whatever. Best place to live for you, I think of the same issue. The most interesting place was was Ethiopia. And they had a suburb because we lived through a real revolution. The worst was probably Lusaka, Lusaka, where never before have we had to grow a garden in order to have enough food in the house for the kids and ourselves.

Never before did we have to run around the town looking for food, things, you know, things to buy. It was just you don't think it's so automatic. You have food all around us there. You have to go and see what had come in that day. And line up. We used to have to line up for milk for our kids, mostly for our kids.

But it was just, you know, you just have to go. This is where Americans are spoiled, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Usually the shelves are full. Yeah. Yeah. What about regrets? You know, do over. Is there is there something you wish you would have done that you didn't do? I mean, while living these very full adventurous lives? Not really, because I don't think there was time to do it.

I mean, the life was pretty perfect. We had we were both working. David was traveling all the time. I was trying. I was both working because I was teaching in all these in the university of all the countries where we lived. And so I always had a full time job and I had to try and keep a home fire burnings.

And that a rather complicated situation. As David said, you don't go to the supermarket once a week, you make it stop it. They really every day at the store, a few drive by, hoping to find something. And how about you, David? Any regrets or things? Yeah, I think I think about it. I. I think I wish I had spent more time with Nelson Mandela.

It was coming towards the end of our and they wanted me to go on to another place, to Bosnia, actually to Eastern Europe. And they were we were there when he got out and we spent a lot of time going with him around to because nobody in South Africa knew what he looked like because they had not allowed any picture of Nelson Mandela in the newspapers or any talk about him.

But he was an extraordinary character. He was you know, he was so gracious. And despite the fact he has been the, you know, put him in prison for 27 years, he was he called for reconciliation. It was a combination of a European aristocrat and a tribal chief. And just in his manner, it was really I only wish I had been able to spend more time there.

You know, we we introduce you as a foreign correspondent, and that's what the official title was. But I have to say, you know, when you read the book, it's it sounds a lot at times like you were a war correspondent, even though it was a good that. And the thing about war correspondents, they always say is it's a it's adrenalin inducing and it's an exciting beat, but it's also a very dangerous beat.

And if you stay in too long, it might end badly. Your life as a foreign correspondent ended with an accident as well, But a different type of different type of accident. Tell us about that. We have a house in Italy, a little village called Moto Solar and that's where we went on our summer vacations there. And I was raking leaves off a retaining wall in front of the house.

We had two or three retaining walls going down the hill and I walked backwards off to the top, the top of the wall, and it was about two meters, so about six or seven feet, and landed on my back and broke two vertebrae. And that was the end of my life as a four or five. Well, well, one way or another.

Yeah, but better than getting shot. Absolutely. Absolutely. Ironic that that's how it happened. Are you in touch with many of the people that you got to know over the course of this journey and in the various countries so much some we are still in touch with David's assistant in Ethiopia, for example. Other we were in touch. You know, as years go by, people fade away.

But for a long time we were in touch with many people and some in some cases, we don't want to be in contact because where are we going to get them into trouble? Well, as for example, Egypt. Yeah. So just knowing an American well or a Saudi or academic or same thing, because they'll track with whom you are holding what you write may be held against that.

Well they'll be blamed. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's become more difficult in some countries or you just don't want to do it because you don't want to get them in trouble. So the last time we went to Egypt, which was just before COVID, trying to, you know, catch up with what was going on, we decided we would not go back because nobody wanted to talk to us even.

And we were very careful. We did not try to contact people in a delicate position and so on. But people who always talk to us before decided that they better not then they everybody had a bad cold during that visit. So so I think the challenge with any book, any book is where you end, right? I mean, the book can be terrific.

And then we get to the ending and it kind of peters out. I was wondering how you were going to end this book, especially with four different voices. I think the ending is terrific. You give Robyn the last word. I'm going to tell our viewers and listeners what Robin says about New York City and how the book ends.

If you remember or I could. yes. No, no, because the person who helped us do the copyediting said that was the A book. Yeah. No, his comment was that with the life he lived as a child, it's not a stranger that he ended up living in New York City because that's probably the only place he could have lived because that would feel like home.

New York City. But the entire world, the international city on the planet is right. Yeah. Great ending. Well, terrific book. Congratulations on a really interesting decision you made to write this. Thanks for sharing it with us. It's called Living Interesting Lives, a memoir. David and Marina Ottaway with help from Sons, Eric and Robin, we hope you enjoyed this edition of Wilson Center now.

And now you'll join us again soon. And I just want to say this is our last program before the New Year. So we want to extend greetings from the Wilson Center to you and your families for our most happy and healthy holiday season and hope to see you in 2025. Thanks for watching.