We present the first in a series of interviews that were conducted by Tom Sykes as part of the research for his upcoming book The Years of Travelling Anxiously, available from Icon Books on March 26. In today’s instalment, journalist, author and filmmaker Iain Overton contends with the stress of being deployed as a journalist to war-torn Somalia mere weeks after the birth of his daughter.
Tom Sykes (TS): You’ve travelled to some very hazardous places. How does anxiety factor into that, if it does at all?
Iain Overton (IO): I recently visited Afghanistan for research and when I looked at the Foreign Office advice it said absolutely do not go there under any circumstances. There is this entire framing of Afghanistan as a dark and dangerous place. As a result, the internet offers very little information useful for going to that country. It’s almost the antithesis of other forms of travel where, before you’ve gone, you’re already there because you can read thousands of reviews and everything’s on Instagram and everything’s been processed. You and I could have a virtual holiday in Paris and ‘visit’ every single element of it using Google Maps and reviews. We could come away from that thinking we know Paris before we’ve been there.
TS: The simulacrum in action.
IO: Yeah. When you get to the edges of the digital landscape, like Papua New Guinea or Mindanao or Helman Province or parts of the Amazon, the panopticon of the digital recedes and suddenly there is absolutely nothing on these places. At that point we start to question our own certainty of our ability to physically go to these places. This links to the imperial endeavour of the cartographer who would try to capture a place on a map and therefore make the place seen – and by seeing it you conquer it.
I’ve always wanted to go to places that haven’t been captured by the digital footprint because therein lies stories that haven’t been told from a journalistic perspective. But I’ve changed as I’ve got older, as I think where my younger self would have said, ‘Okay, there’s nothing on this area so let’s go’, whereas my older self has tended to fear going to places about which there’s absolutely no information because the potential for horror is greater.
I think this links into Sartre’s notion of freedom and anxiety. Human existence is defined by radical freedom, which can lead to nausea, disorientation and anxiety. I made a series for BBC Two called Places That Don’t Exist presented by Simon Reeve and it made me think that wanting to go to places that don’t exist in the digital framing is both the ultimate in freedom, as it breaks away from the tyranny of TripAdvisor, but also puts you outside familiar structures, which causes existential angst.
Alain de Botton writes about how travel contrasts with idealised expectation and ultimately leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. This applies to locations that have been incredibly well-trodden because you’ve got the anticipation of beauty and excitement but when you get there it’s graffiti and dog shit and rude wait waiters. So many people have slept in this Airbnb bed before me that all uniqueness in the experience is eroded.
The opposite can happen where you turn up somewhere and it truly feels novel that nobody’s really written about it extensively. It feels fresh. As part of a documentary film crew, I’ve been to untethered places that are in the liminal space of the travel experience and aren’t known about. For example, when I went to South Korea it wasn’t very open to the West. I remember feeling anxiety about those trips because I was capturing something new and showing it to millions of people. I was instrumental in dissipating its aura. I was taking something brilliant and exciting and making a film about it that obliterated all the painful aspects of the trip to show the highlights. In a sense, I was in the vanguard of people offering that kind of Instagram experience with travel documentaries, offering people the thrill of travel in their living room without the challenge of having to go yourself.
I was also conscious of my complicity in other problems, which caused a certain level of anxiety. I was complicit in global warming and mass tourism. I was helping to bring wealth into those communities that I was filming but simultaneously I was eroding the cultural uniqueness of these locations. When I went back to some of these locations twenty years later I saw that now there was a Starbucks and facilities for the backpacker community. Everything’s in English and I’m not begrudging that – it means a new generation of people can go there. But I worry that we’ve made everything familiar and accessible, which is a form of colonialism. I didn’t even realise I was doing it at the time. That brings some anxiety to my heart.
TS: We’ve talked before about travel anxiety stemming from a kind of dissonance between an earlier self and a current self and different aspects of our personality clashing. Could you say more about how that’s affected you?
IO: There was a point in my career about twenty years ago when I was working as a BBC producer. I was told by my bosses that, if I wanted to stay in London, I would have to do the jobs that were given to me and I didn’t have much agency in that process. The alternative I was given was to work in Scotland as a full-time producer. But I wasn’t from Scotland, I’m from London. So I was sort of given this sort of fait accompli that, if I stayed in London, I could continue working but I would have to accept every job given to me.
My daughter was born around the time I was called into the office and told that I’d have to make a series about conflicts around the world. In the previous year, I’d been to quite a number of conflict zones so I was suffering from a bit of legacy trauma. I’d been shot at in Iraq, for instance, and I hadn’t dealt with the emotions stemming from that. I was told I had to go to Somalia and investigate the breakaway state of Somaliland.
I spent around three weeks in the fug of a wonderful family unit and admiring her little hands and feet and every single little thing she did, as young parents do. My world was suddenly compressed into this very small space inside which was just me, my daughter and her mother. I was suddenly shifted from this whirlwind of activity to Mogadishu, Somalia. There wasn’t much in the way of pre-planning – we had two days to prep for our trip. The film was to be made very much in the spirit of Gonzo journalism. The diktat we were given was: film everything, just never stop. If it ends up being boring, we can always just spool through the rushes. This was a country about which there was very little coverage coming in the West. Before I’d left I’d spoken to a couple of academics about the nature of Somalia and Somaliland and the tensions between them. But there was no guidebook to Mogadishu.
Before I knew it, I was on a connecting flight to Nairobi from London Heathrow and I remember walking down the gangway, every step another step away from my child and into a great unknown. I was convinced that each step I took was a step towards my own death. I felt as though I was on a conveyor belt – if I turned around and went back to my family, I’d immediately lose my job with the BBC. So I was forced to go travelling. There was a real rupture between the intensity of the familial experience and then finding myself heading towards a war zone.
The anxiety came out of mixed feelings about myself and what I was doing. I was only going to Somalia in order to maintain my job as a producer. Don’t get me wrong, I desperately wanted to do journalism like this. Before I’d gone I’d been told repeatedly how lucky I was that I was being asked to do this and how brilliant an opportunity it was. But simultaneously, it was all wrapped up in this fear that, if I don’t do it, my career will end overnight.
Within forty-eight hours, we were in a barren field on the outskirts of Morgadishu with ten guys in the back of a pickup truck and a heavy machine gun on top. They were chewing kat, which is a local drug there. It was boiling hot, fifty-odd degrees. A dead cow was in the middle of the road. There had been reports of shootings the night before and I was conscious of two journalists who had gone there just before I had gone and both been killed in the fighting. We were in a place of extreme tension.
At the end of that first day, I shut the door of my hotel room. I felt like I was in a grave. I was in this whitewashed room that had no windows, which was boiling hot. Terror lurked outside. I was the opposite of where I wanted to be, which was lying next to my daughter on a bed. I missed that comfort.
I don’t think that many people get to feel like that. I imagine it’s not too dissimilar to being a soldier, except without any of the sureties of having a weapon to defend yourself or being part of a structure or hierarchy that is there to protect you. As a journalist, I think you’re in a unique position where you’re exquisitely exposed to the chaos of life because that’s what you’re there to report on and communicate to an audience.
TS: When you embarked on this career you must have had some sense of the risks involved and therefore the kind of anxiety and fear that could be generated by it. Is that something that you wanted to court because it would make you a better person or give you some insight into the world that you wouldn’t have been able to obtain otherwise? I guess I’m also asking what led you into this line of work and form of travel.
IO: A couple of things. My father was in the British military. I remember coming home from school one day and my mother was incredibly excited because my father had just been given a new posting to Hong Kong for three years. My seven-year-old self didn’t really know what Hong Kong was, but I felt foreboding because I knew it was far away. I knew that it would mean that they would send me to a boarding school in Britain. My parents went from being close to being thousands of miles away. That was a traumatic experience for a child of seven or eight.
Again, there was a lack of agency. The military had sent my father and mother away and there was nothing to be done. I was told that boarding school was for my own benefit, but I ended up
being the only long-term boarder there. Other kids were there from Monday till Thursday, but I was there all the time in this big drafty room on my own.
I saw my parents three times a year. I would get on a plane and fly all the way out to Hong Kong see them. From a very early age getting on a plane to go to a far-off location was rooted in a combination of longing and a sense of national duty. My father was defending Hong Kong for Britain. I also had a notion that I should be grateful because I was told repeatedly that I was lucky to receive a boarding school education. From the beginning, then, I had a painful and conflicting relationship with travel.
At the time I was at boarding school you were taught about the virtue of imperialism. The boarding school originated as a colonial endeavour intended to train future leaders who would travel to far-flung parts of the empire and then serve as judges or or consuls or whatever. As time passed, the British Empire fell apart but I was nonetheless influenced to choose a career that enabled or promised travel.
TS: Were you also seeking the approval of your father, as someone who had travelled for queen and country?
IO: My father was an immigrant to Britain so my upbringing was very much focused on travel as a virtue. Going to another place was considered just a good thing to do. Where we’re going next and what we’ve seen and where we are remain dominant features of family conversation. We’re constantly of the belief that the future is always on the horizon and in some distant location.
TS: Where was your father from originally?
IO: From Peru. And he was sent from there to boarding school in Britain so that gave him the conviction that boarding school was a good thing for all of us. To go back to this cartographic framing of empire, he also had this sense of duty about going to a different land and recording what happens in that distant place. In my case, this endeavour became linked to a family dynamic in which love was always on a distant horizon. While I was growing up, my mother was always in a distant location. I’ve taken that into adulthood with the feeling that airports are great places of opportunity and possibility. My earlier career was always very much driven by this innate psychological need to always be in a different location. I’ve been to 110 countries now.
Over time, I’ve noticed a shift in my motivation for travelling. Now it’s less about myself and more about my purpose as a writer: to capture the voices of those who are disenfranchised or unable to articulate. I’ve come to strangely inverted that notion of duty and that relationship
with the British state. Now I travel to expose violations of the British state in foreign countries. Whilst the impulse is still there from my eight-year-old self wanting to be on a distant horizon, rather than producing anthropological travelogues that are culturally othering people abroad in a slightly imperialistic way, today I go and interview people who have suffered violence at the hands of the British state. I’ve done this in Kenya and I’ve interrogated Britain’s relationship with Rwanda. I’ve gone to Iraq and the Afghan-Pakistan border to find out what’s happened in the conflicts there. A lot of my current work is rooted in holding the British state accountable for human rights abuses it has committed very far away from Britain.
There’s been an evolution from the eight-year-old without agency to the adult who is challenging the networks and systems that suspended that agency in the first place. I’m challenging imperialism and I’m challenging distance. My younger self would tell anecdotes about my travels as though they were amulets. I don’t really talk about that anymore. That’s not really my impetus. I contrast my experience to army officers my age, who have retired or gone into security work. They reel out a list of countries they’ve been to as if it bears the weight of moral certainty and superiority, ignoring the fact that often they’ve been there to fight and kill people. Whilst I list some of the countries I’ve been to, I wear them as a weight of horror because I’ve gone to them to expose abuses.
TS: Do you ever feel anxious about the work you do now, to accurately and fairly represent the disenfranchised and oppressed peoples that have been on the business end of the imperialism that you were coached early on to to support?
IO: I think that, when I travel now, there is a sense of profound purpose for capturing the suffering of others. It doesn’t lend itself towards the picturesque. I’m not going there to capture a wonderful scene or to romanticise something. I’ve learned what not to do from my early career when I’d be in an all-white film crew turning up in a country to make a film sometimes through the prism of satire. We were sometimes mocking the cultures we were filming. I wouldn’t make those kinds of films now.
I did this series with this FHM journalist called Grub Smith, who was famed for his Gonzo journalism persona. We were employed to go to different countries and do five challenges in the Anneka Rice mode. It was meant to be light and entertaining fare, but there was always a whiff of the reductive about it. The challenges we were setting ourselves were rooted in absolute cliches about the cultures we were visiting. We were in Korea so, you know, we had to eat dog. We filmed outside a cafe where Grub was eating dog out of a polystyrene box. This Korean man knew exactly what we were doing. He was drunk and grew quite angry with us because I think he knew in a way that we didn’t know that we were reducing a very complex and multi-layered culture into eating dog. The implication was this can’t be civilized. The Korean man physically assaulted us. He wanted us to stop filming so he tried to break my camera. At the time, I thought that we were in the right and he was in the wrong because he had resorted to violence. But when I look back on it, I sympathise with him.
We as filmmakers ought to have put things into historical context. One reason why Koreans had been eating dog since the 1950s was the war. It destroyed the economy and this was all many people had to eat. We took this context-free approach over and over again on that programme. We went to a bar in the Philippines called the Hobbit House where all the waiters are people of smaller stature.
TS: I’ve been there, yeah.
IO: One of the challenges we set was that Grub had to drink one of the waiters under the table. What we didn’t contemplate was the fact that, maybe in the 2000s, if you were born with a height challenge in the Philippines there might be no other jobs available for you. Not only were we mocking them but we were complicit in a situation in which they had little agency. We didn’t in any way, shape or form ask the employees how they felt about this. We just rocked up there and filmed them and thought, we can film anything. Therein lies both the arrogance of young white male filmmakers. Under the guise of Gonzo journalism is this notion that your responsibility is suspended. You don’t have to abide by the rules and therefore you can behave obnoxiously. It’s devoid of empathy.
That was my former self and now my current self is writing a book about toxic capitalism and how commodification and consumption in the Western world has deep and reverberating effects all around the world. There is some virtue to my past travels, as they have helped me to nowadays view the world in a different frame.
More instalments to follow weekly through March in the lead-up to the release of The Years of Travelling Anxiously by Tom Sykes.
