Melissa Hekkers - Amirs Blue Elephant

The journey that led me to write this book is very close to my heart. It's through the realms of a humanitarian crisis that I met myself. It's also where I met hundreds of people who cultivated my passion for humanity, for righteousness and for a way of life that meets eye-to-eye with my virtues and visions. It can only be symbolic to want to thank each of these people. Yet there are specific people who have contributed to making this book a reality, and this is why I want to single them out here. The Casale Flaminia Residency, Ralph Overbeck in particular and Mellisa Felix, my mentor, for your support, encouragement, trust and abundant guidance. My Publisher (Armida Books), Haris Ioannides, for embracing my work and pushing on through, my parents and family for an ever growing faith in my never ending (ad)ventures, my closest of friends -you know who you are- who insistently remind me that following your dreams is non-negotiable and my daughter, for all her brightness.

My work desk was neat and tidy. Like it was every morning. The only remains of last nights shift was my empty coffee cup. The lingering brown coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup resembled the way I felt. Dry. Stagnant. Empty. Not much to say for myself; unless someone was willing to read my coffee cup; delve into its whispers. I guess that would be a solution to finding my way around my next steps. Let someone else envision my life for a while. Day in, day out, the gloom of the newsroom impelled me to break loose; forget about everything and seek the truth elsewhere than within the news headlines.

As a journalist, I had been preoccupied with the ever-growing refugee crisis for the past ten years, at the very least, although it somehow felt like much longer than that. By nature I felt that I had been a migrant all my life. I had migrated from my birth country with my mother at the age of eight and I had never really acquired a new home; or the feeling of belonging that I imagined was attached to it. This was one of the reasons why my career as a journalist very much revolved around migration issues. It spoke to me.

Yet at the peak of the crisis in 2015, I felt that my purpose to divulge the truth about what really lay behind the movement of peoples wasnt being met. I was done with reporting on the number of boats that crossed the shores of Turkey and Libya into Italy and Greece. I wasnt interested in the battles NGOs fought with local authorities on the ways the influx of people was being (mal) handled. I was weary of government spiels on the immensity of the problem. And I was silently witnessing the urgent needs of people being uprooted from the destinies they had worked on for an entire lifetime to realise. Just like thousands of us around the world, I was guilty of assessing their truth based on assumption.

So what you working on today? blurted Oliver, my editor-in-chief, a tall, middle-aged man who carried himself well and whose grey goatee defined his composure. Over the years, he had defiantly managed to keep me on my toes and in consequence I repeatedly second-guessed the actuality I purveyed through my words. Deep down, his judgement centred on an ambiguity I knew wasnt justified yet his position of power allowed it. Rarely did he accept any piece of my writing without having something to add, something to nitpick.

Is this geezer real? he asked me, pointing at one of the stories I had written for the morning paper. He was scanning the newspaper as he paced around the office. As I watched him prance around, he stretched his arm out to switch the radio on.

Those were his words Oliver. Word for word, I replied as a matter of fact. My tone of voice indicated that I had no time for his whims. I had written a story about a family of stateless Syrian Kurds who were on a hunger strike outside the presidential palace, seeking Cypriot nationality and consequently freedom of movement. I despised the way he dismissed peoples opinions, their aspirations, and merely anything that wasnt logically sound. He disregarded any piece of writing that had a human angle to it. He wanted numbers. He wanted facts. He wanted the cold reality.

But do you believe him, is the question, he added speaking slower than usual with the irritating smirk he so often made use of. He was an avid football fan who brought his four sons up with a vengeance. He thrived on asking rhetorical questions that shattered my approach to news writing, yet throughout the years I had always maintained that what true journalism was really about was discovering the truth and more importantly letting others tell the story, unfiltered through my own biases and understandings.

The sound of the fax machine behind us jolted me back to Olivers question. As if hed never left the 90s, he still relied on these relics. The fax machine should have been something of the distant past yet he lived by it; at times I joked that press releases printed on fax paper descended from another era. But before I managed to formulate a full sentence in response, he had already scanned the fax he had just picked up from the fax machine and threw it on my desk like a Frisbee.