The brutal wars of recent decades — think Serbia, Rwanda and Iraq — have seen female reporters courageously facing the same dangers as their male peers. Janine Di Giovanni, a distinguished war correspondent, in "Ghosts By Daylight" recalls in sensitively calibrated prose the costs of both war and love.
Di Giovanni began writing about war when she covered the Palestinian Intifada in the 1980s. Since then, she has covered wars in Rwanda, the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. But in 2004, married and expecting a baby, she and husband Bruno, a noted photographer, moved to Paris. There she "needed to be stable, to wake up and know where I would be that day, that night, the next morning."
As her difficult pregnancy progresses and she gives birth to son Luca, she recalls her war experiences: how she met Bruno in the 1990s at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, currently under siege; the young Bosnian soldier who tells her he knows she is thinking that he won't survive; the prisoners facing death in the Ivory Coast who ask her to record their names so their families will know their fate; and the soldier in an African market who removed the safety catch and then pointed the gun at her heart.
Though happy to be a mother, the birth awakened fears that had long been buried: "I hoarded water — tinned food — and things that might be hard to get — medicines." She was terrified of something happening to her baby. "I realized that war, with all its dangers seemed utterly normal to me — this real life, with all its sharp edge, was terribly difficult." But as she adjusts, Bruno, unable to sleep, begins drinking heavily. Quoting Thucyides' comment that "War is a violent teacher," she describes how Bruno, tormented by long suppressed memories, must be hospitalized.
After his return, "he was never really the same again — the ghost of the past was chasing us. And they had managed to catch him."
Di Giovanni, more resilient, began to accept short assignments. Though life with Bruno became a bittersweet experience, a friend advised her to try to live a happy life: "We are not as broken as you think."
It was advice she heeded, recounted in a memoir that is also a graphic tally of the costs of war.
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