Craft of Narrative Nonfiction
How to Report/Write about Poverty
Immersion and investigation with Katherine Boo, the author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo met her husband Sunil Khilnani (the Indian academic and author of the book Idea of India) in 2001. And that’s how she got to listen to a lot of dining table conversations of people from the Indian urban upper-middle class, conversations of people who were undoubtedly on the winning side of the Indian liberalization drama that started a decade earlier. These people’s opinions on the condition of India’s poor fell at the extremes of a spectrum — some believed everything had changed for the country’s poor with the post-reform economic growth, when others thought that India’s poor saw no changes in their fortune while parts of the country prospered.
Katherine was familiar with these standard arguments on poverty, and she believed the opinions at both the extremes were wrong, that the reality was more complex than the all-or-none understanding of poverty of the people. She knew that there must be some people whose lives saw no material changes for every few people who climbed their way out of poverty. So she decided to report on poverty in 21st century India, an India connected with the global market and affected by its fluctuations. And she chose Annawadi, a slum of some 3000 people near the Mumbai international airport, as the subject of her study.
Before she spent nearly four years, from late 2007 to 2011, in Annawadi, reporting on the people of a slum surrounded by luxuries of the world, Katherine had won a Pulitzer for Public Service in 2000 for her investigative work on government-run group homes for cognitively-challenged people in Washington DC. Her reporting for the New Yorker on the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s counter-poverty policy of state-sponsored marriage in Oklahoma had won her many accolades.
The book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is a unique work of nonfiction because it stands at the intersection of the methods of immersion journalism and investigative journalism. It’s a wonderful demonstration of Katherine Boo’s ability to both develop complex multidimensional characters and interrogate the institutions and structures of a community at the same time. The book, in spite of being a work of nonfiction, is so rich in narrative, that it inspired the English playwright David Hare to develop a play based on the book. Here are some of the guiding philosophies and techniques we can learn from Kate Boo to make our writing and reporting on poverty more nuanced and more narrative rich.
Economists and NGOs don’t have monopoly over poverty.
Often in issues of politics and policy, one sees a wide gap between theory and reporting, between the official story, as recorded in formal documents, and the reality. Katherine Boo believes that is the case for issues like globalization, poverty eradication, and economic inequality, which are over-theorized, as amongst economists, and under-reported, as in mainstream media. And that “chasm between the lives that people have and the way they are officially recorded,” fascinates Katherine Boo.
Many times, when the theory is flawless, reporting by investigative journalists reveals the numerous flaws that manifest in the practice — flaws that are invisible from the high towers of corporations and academia. A case in point is the Vox investigation into global public health financing that pulled the curtain on the practice of consultancy firms taking millions of dollars out of the Gates Foundation contributions to the WHO.
But that kind of reporting is rare. Most of the time, when there is reporting on global poverty, it’s far from original, just a rehashing of the lines of an NGO, a think-tank, or a government agency, produced by journalists who call them for a “guided tour” of a low-income community. Katherine Boo describes that practice as:
“A reporter will go to an NGO and say, ‘Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.’ It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with an NGO helping him.”
As a result of this practice, the chasm between theory and reporting, the official story and the reality, is produced and reproduced again and again. Your goal as a reporter should be to eliminate that distance. In fact, Katherine first visited Annawadi with an official to see a self-help microfinance(another of those controversial counter-poverty measures) group there, but the enthusiasm of the women, in the project, was nowhere close to the excitement shown by the official. She sensed something was wrong.
Be self-critical.
Some journalists and artists approach and depict people from low-income communities as people fundamentally different from themselves and their audience, people from middle and affluent classes. It’s either the malnourished children or the women in colorful sarees, the former for a charity event and the later for a woke audience, the children, a symbol of despair, a call for help, the women, a symbol of beauty in squalor, a scarce commodity in the most unexpected of places. Both of them, problematic. Both of them, reductionist. While one simplifies, the other romanticizes.
For Katherine Boo, there has to be an investigative element to every reporting on poverty, a willingness on the part of the reporter, or the artist, to dig deeper into life in a low-income community. The reporter must interrogate the institutional structures of the community. She must examine the quality of public services they receive, the school, the hospital, the sewage system, the availability of drinking water, cooking fuel, and electricity, access to banks and credit, and their relationship with the police and the criminal justice system. In her words(emphasis mine):
“If I’m just telling stories, if I’m not investigating injustice of some kind that’s affecting them (the poor communities), if I’m not doing documentary investigative work to expose something, to me, it’s just poverty porn.”
Also for Katherine, the goal must not only be to make your audience ‘aware’ of the existence of poverty, there should be more to the mission, such as identifying and exposing the corrupt officials, the criminals, and the bad apples of a community, which she does in the book.
In a similar vein, with the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, another of Katherine’s goals is to understand how people make their way out of poverty, the mechanisms of social upward mobility, the infrastructure of opportunity in the society, she calls it. What intrigued her about Annawadi, and Mumbai in general, was that given the level of inequality, what stopped the society from imploding. So keep these questions in your mind while reporting.
Quality of your work matters more than your identity.
Partly because of the colonial experience and partly under the hold of nationalism, Indians tend to reject any outsider’s take, that is of western journalists and academics, on their society and history, especially when the take is critical of their past or of their current government, whereas white ladies doing yoga and white dudes singing Hare Krishna gives them absolute goosebumps. There are some valid justifications for that skepticism, sometimes westerners do mess up, but most of the time it’s unwarranted.
While starting to work on the project, Katherine knew that she had to explain for her non-Indianness. She describes her fears as:
“And at first, I thought, ‘I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.’”
But this situation wasn’t also new for her. She had previously worked in communities where she didn’t belong. And she took the same approach for Annawadi as she had done for those other low-income communities. She made up for her limitations by spending more time in the community, by giving adequate attention to every dimension of slum life, aggressively securing documents through RTI, and cross-checking accounts of people she interviewed.
For Katherine Boo, there are some attitudes that determine the quality of your reporting from low-income communities: diligence in methods, a tendency of not whining about the harsh environmental conditions and hectic working hours, accuracy of accounts, and personal integrity(do not add and do not deceive). These all contribute to the perception of your credibility as a writer. And credibility is, if not then should be, valued more than identity.
Throwaway the guilt.
A nonfiction writer who writes about the monopolistic practices of big tech companies or the global financial system has less number of moral and ethical questions to answer than someone writing about people living in poor communities or mental health, which is because of the writer’s high degree of exposure to the vulnerabilities of other people. And those dilemmas get quadrupled when you write about poverty,
There is the good old dilemma of interventionism. As a reporter, your ethics prohibit you from giving your subjects money or solving their problems for them. You can’t also promise that their conditions will get better if they cooperate, tolerate your relentless questioning, and give you the details to reconstruct some scenes and tell the story. These generate tons of guilt.
Katherine says:
“But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.”
The guilt is unjustified, what you should do is maintain transparency with your subjects about your journalistic objectives. And you should understand that poverty eradication is a long-term process, and your reporting is just a minor contribution to that greater cause.And your subjects should have the agency to decide which parts of their lives they want excluded from the narrative, depriving them of this right is unethical.
And Katherine advises against parachute journalism, the practice of landing in a community after some “big terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse.” Do the kind of work in which your assumptions about the world would be challenged. Ask how your findings confirm or contradict your understanding of how the world works, and whether the lives of people and communities you meet offer insights into larger questions at work.
Here is how Isabel Wilkerson deals with the intervention dilemma:
Memory sucks.
As Katherine was spending time with the people of Annawadi, she was diligent about keeping an accurate record of her observations and interactions. Though written notes made up a big part of her documentary field work, videotapes and audio recordings were also critical to her reporting and writing process. She had with her some 6000hours of video footage by the end of her stay.
The video recording functions as an extension to your visual memory. As you sit down to write your narrative, you’ll only be able to fractionally recall the details of the environment and your emotional reaction to the events you are narrating. With your notes, you’ll be able to fill in some absent details. But for a scene to captivate your audience, you need to give them an emotional experience along with an action sequence. Video recordings help you recreate a scene with rich visual details while writing the narrative, and by reminding you how you felt and how your subjects felt about the event you are narrating, at the moment of the recording, they give you a sense of what kind of emotional impact you should aspire for while narrating that event.
People’s account of an event changes with their circumstances. Many times, they will exaggerate their successes or their contribution to a collective cause or event. People also won’t hesitate to change the accounts if the accounts appear to threaten their good relationship with powers that be. Apart from that the usual failure of memory, the failure to retrieve and recall, will also threaten the investigative aspirations of your project.
As psychologists have suggested, we regularly modify our memories. So as observers and writers, we should also take our own memory with skepticism. Without verifiable cross-checking, with no written or audio or visual evidence to support your claims, questions will be asked about the accuracy of your reporting and your credibility as a writer. And the solution to that is audio and video recording.
Be skeptical of public records.
Over her research and reporting period in Annawadi, Katherine gathered more than 3000 public records, some of which obtained through years of petitioning government agencies under the RTI, the Indian equivalent of Freedom of Information Act.
The documents included records from the Mumbai police, the public health department, the state and central educational bureaucracies, the electoral offices, records on city ward officers, records of public hospitals, morgues, and the courts.
One utility of public records for the process of investigative journalism lies in their potential to validate the many details discerned through observation and interviewing.
With a bit of thinking, you also realize that in developing countries, where the public institutions are not as good as they could be, to say the least, the records reflect the interests and perspectives of those in power. They reveal the means by which government corruption and indifference erase from the public record the experience of poor citizens. As was the case with Kalu, whose death was wrongfully categorized as death from TB, when in reality he was murdered. So Katherine says:
“Though I seek out public record maniacally, I don’t assume that it’s accurate.”
And she advises to always supplement analysis of public records with “hang-out journalism,” with observation and investigation on the ground.
Nobody is representative.
When journalists are tasked with reporting on a community, they would often go for the most virtuous or the most vicious characters in the community. Because the lives of these characters make for more click-worthy stories, as they confirm the stereotypes the audience has about the community, which has been the case for Native American communities.
But communities are never monolithic, and people are never homogeneous. Therefore Katherine suggests to select a range of characters that’s more reflective of the community. In her words:
“But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That’s just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they are still people. Making them representatives loses sight of that.”
In the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Abdul is the one who has been successful in making a living, and sustaining his 11-member family, by sorting and selling the waste in what we call the informal economy, when the majority of the people don’t have permanent jobs. His family, though the most well-off among Annawadians, is also one of the only two Muslim families in the slum. Their neighbor Fatima is a rebel against her destiny. Manju, a 18 year old girl, will be the first college graduate from the slum, and her mother Asha aspires to one day become a corporator, the de facto slum-lord, and live the urban middle-class life. There is Kalu who isn’t shy about stealing and selling scrap, and Sunil, his friend, who is against stealing.
Listen and Observe.
Immersion refers to the process of embedding yourself in an ecosystem, and a journalist can take it up as a method to report about something with more depth, and to write a greater number of narratives. The most famous of the immersive journalists is Ted Conover, who used his training in anthropology to report about prison life, while working as a prison guard, and about industrial slaughterhouses while working as a supervisor for the federal government.
One of the methods of gathering material for immersion reporting is interviewing. You can go and start a conversation with people, ask them questions from a prepared questionnaire or let the flow of the conversation and your curiosity lead you to unfamiliar dimensions or new sources.
But the problem with that method, Katherine points out, is that it gives an unfair advantage to the people with greater verbal aptitude, people with greater command over language and better vocabulary, people who went to school or college. And that’s not desirable when you are interviewing in low-income neighborhoods with low literacy rate.
A better method would be to watch and listen, to see the people in action, to note the choices they make, record their conversations, their behavior and response, and infer their character, their value system, their convictions and beliefs. from these notes and recordings. Katherine Boo suggests:
“Listening and observing often work much better and reveal much more about the complexity of someone than the answers that they give to questions about themselves.”
Here is the article on the methods of Leslie T. Chang:
Show the extra-economic dimension.
It’s the convention with nonfiction writing to describe the body language of the characters. And poverty reporters limit the scope of their story only to the economic dimension, the low income part, of the lives of their characters. But for Katherine Boo, there is always more to the characters than the body language and the low wages. She describes her conviction as(emphasis mine):
“I think my premise, when I walk into a community and begin to document with my video camera and audio, is that the people I’m meeting are every bit as complex as I am.”
Every character has a moral code, a philosophical dimension. Abdul, the charmless always-busy-in-work fellow seeks to see value in the worst possible life. He has thought about inequality, their standing in society, and their powerlessness. In the book, he once says, “in Annawadi, fortunes derive not just from what people did or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged,” which shows his understanding of the role of chance in a life without any safety net.
Sunil, whose mother died of tuberculosis and whose father is an alcoholic, and who has been sustaining himself and his sister by gathering and stealing metal from the airport, gives us a glimpse of his strong aesthetic sense when he protects six lotuses in the airport compound and saves the little parrots living on a tree beside the sewage lake so that others can share their beauty.
Katherine says that Sunil could have easily collected the flowers and the parrots to sell them for food. But he didn’t. So, as writers, we have to believe, and show in our work, that there are values and philosophies that help people keep going in the shortage of cash and bread. Katherine calls choices like those of Sunil’s “extra-economic choices,” choices that are emotional, choices made outside of economic calculations, and we, as writers, have to give those choices the space they deserve in your narrative.
For a fair portrait, you also have to show the ugliness in people, the way everyone hates their neighbors in Annawadi, their jealousy at the moderate success of the Hussain family, Abdul’s family, and their willingness to exploit illicit means to climb up the social ladder.
The burden is on you.
There is no lying that there are some topics which are considered to be high-valence, that the readers find more engaging. Narrative accounts of “true crime” — a bank heist, a decade long manhunt for a serial killer, a kidnapping gone wrong, war crimes committed in Afghanistan — grab the attention of the reader and keep the reader with them. They are the perfect examples of high-valence topics. But poverty or social policy isn’t one of them. Katherine states that observation as:
“If you are writing about poverty and disadvantage and things that are sometimes difficult to read, it’s like people are looking for a reason not to read it.”
But that doesn’t mean you should stop writing on poverty. Katherine gives the example of David Simon, and how he experimented with forms of storytelling. Simon, who used to work for the Baltimore Sun as a reporter, wrote a good nonfiction book, titled Homicide, with a year of immersion and investigative work with the city police, on the malfunctioning criminal justice system of that city. News reporting and a book could only get a fraction of attention he thought these structural problems deserved. So, he wrote what came to be The Wire, the HBO drama that told that complex story through compelling characters and powerful narratives. The Wire still ranks today as the best TV show on IMDb, and most people don’t know of David’s work before that show.
Some reporters believe that a better way to communicate a story, and get more attention, is to dumb it down, reduce the complexity, nuance, and diversity.
But Katherine suggests the reporter should give more weight to the momentum of the narrative, to have faith in that device to carry the readers through the book. Don’t oversimplify, she suggests, instead manipulate the pace and momentum for engagement, by carefully deciding what you leave out and what you keep, and by saying what you have to with “more economy and more force.”
Another trick is to find a cheap lead. Everybody loves a good story about corruption, especially the people of the middle class. If you want people to read your stuff, then package your story about poverty within a story of corruption.
For Katherine, the bottom-line is: Subsidize the reader’s lack of interest with your surplus of interest. Simply put, figure out a way to transfer some of your enthusiasm about the subject to your readers.
Follow the policy.
For practicing investigative journalists, the mantra “follow the trail” is as sacred as “do no harm” is to a practicing surgeon. As government decisions involve multiple departments, and each department stores only its own share of documents, it’s the investigative journalist’s job to connect the decision makers to their actions and their consequences through those inter-departmental letters, orders, notifications, and memos that bear the evidence of the communications.
Another similar maxim is “follow the money,” money that is allocated through the anti-poverty schemes. A reporter can always trace how that money moves from the capital city, the treasury, to the constituency where it is supposed to be put into use. Katherine adds to them the mantra of, follow the policy:
“If you take seriously a policy, that it’s meant to better the lives of people, you can’t just take it seriously as a piece of intellection. You have to really look at how it works on the ground, and there has to be some kind of feedback loop, some kind of accountability, otherwise it’s all for nothing.”
For any journalist or public commentator, it is easy to get tangled in abstract policy debates, the kind of conversation where the goal is to assess the optimality of alternative policy options.
But we should remember that every policy has winners and losers, and by benefiting some interest groups more than others, policies show how all our interests are interdependent and how we all are connected in the society. By tracing a policy’s implementation, the journalist also serves to the goals of accountability journalism, which positions the institution of journalism as the fourth pillar in democracy.
Diversify your sources of feedback.
There would be obvious interpretation challenges when you are a foreign writer not fluent with the language, accents, and manners of your subjects, the community you are working in. Katherine worked with multiple translators to cross-reference each one’s interpretation of a conversation between characters or a document in the local language.
Once her field research, a kind of sociological survey, was over and those interviews were incorporated into the narratives she was building, she would give her Indian friends, fluent in the language, to evaluate the fidelity of her framing to the original accounts. She says:
“To calibrate my compass as a writer, I share my work widely and not only with journalists.”
Further ahead in the writing process, she would give other people, not the editors, the work to read and give her feedback. And those people included not only political scientists, anthropologists, and other academics, but also social justice and freedom of information activists, teachers, friends who volunteered, and even her teenage nephew. Their responses helped her understand when the writing got boring, and the narrative lost its coherence. She also decided to let the reader know when she had uncertainties, meaning when there wasn’t enough clarity to give a solid judgement or conclusion.
Mail me at prasadforpublish21@gmail.com. On Twitter, I’m @atriontwitr
SOURCES:
- The Author’s note from her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers(2012, Random House)
- Her interview with Emily Brennan for Guernica
- The Columbia Journalism Review piece on her.
- Her interaction with Steve Coll at Columbia School of Journalism.
- Her interaction with Steve Clemons of The Atlantic at the UCSD.
- An interview at the Wheeler Center.
- An interview at the Hall Center.
- An interview with her at the Oregon Humanities Center.
