A coffee with… | Akli Aït Abdallah, senior reporter

The day after our meeting, his work email no longer existed. Akli Aït Abdallah handed over his computer to Radio-Canada. A more than symbolic gesture, officially marking the retirement of this great reporter – in every sense of the word – after 30 years with the public broadcaster.

Marc Cassivi
The Press

“Does it make your heart ache?

– It has been a big pinch, from the beginning. Even if I don’t mind missing this election campaign! “, he confides to me, smiling.

I met Akli on a soccer field in the mid-1990s, thanks to colleagues Robert Frosi and Jean Gounelle. He had recently been a researcher at Radio-Canada radio, which was not yet called ICI Première. I remember a discreet player, who stepped aside to highlight his teammates. A smuggler. We are in sport as in life…

I lost sight of Akli, even though we bumped into each other occasionally in the halls of Radio-Canada. I had great pleasure in listening to his rich and reassuring voice on the radio, the simple and poetic sentences of the narrations of his reports. His unique way of reporting on events, going first and foremost to meet people, in order to give them a voice more than to collect their confidences.

Akli Aït Abdallah was a war reporter, that of Kosovo, that of Iraq. He met Arafat, saw Kadhafi’s corpse. He has covered earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti, the second intifada in Israel and Palestine, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. But he mainly did some reporting in Quebec.

“I learned not to say that people here are complaining when elsewhere there are people who receive bombs on the head. Do not compare pain. A pain, it is also important, regardless of the circumstances, ”he says, telling me the story of a campsite owner, Mr. Beausoleil, who lost everything in the floods of Noyan, in Montérégie, in 2011. .

Akli had given me an appointment in a café in the Côte-des-Neiges district where he had, for years, used to meet Algerian and Tunisian expatriate friends on Saturday mornings for the traditional Moorish café. Right across the street is still the Terrasse Royale hotel, where he spent his first night in Montreal 32 years ago with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. He lived for four years in one of the most multi-ethnic neighborhoods in his adopted city, initially scraping by. “The first two years were tough,” he recalls.

Akli Aït Abdallah was a journalist at the French-language weekly Algeria-News, after a degree in statistics and graduate studies in urban planning in Paris, when he decided to emigrate to Canada. It was chance, he says, that made him switch from the written press to the radio shortly after his arrival in Quebec.

He had met a researcher from the show North South from Radio-Québec (now Télé-Québec), reporting from Algiers, Fabienne Julien, who introduced her to her sister, Pauline Julien, and her husband Gérald Godin. Fabienne’s daughter, Geneviève Guay, was Akli’s first editor-in-chief at Radio-Canada. It was she who suggested that he switch to radio reporting after seven years as a researcher.

He is full of praise for this “godmother” and all those who facilitated her professional integration, including her late friend Réginald Martel, former literary critic of The Press who was also his radio researcher colleague, and Sylvain Desjardins, who strongly encouraged him to accept his first assignment abroad, to Sunday Magazine.

He had initially refused to go to Albania, to cover the exodus of Kosovars, for fear of not being up to it. “Sylvain Desjardins said to me: ‘If you don’t go, I’ll go, and I’m very tempted.’ He made me understand that I couldn’t refuse, that I would regret not having broken the ice. That’s how I entered the caste of great reporters! he laughs.

It was in 1999. Nine years earlier, in September 1990, Akli Aït Abdallah had left Algeria just before the civil war and the outbreak of Islamist attacks, in particular against journalists from his own editorial staff.

“It was butchery, carnage. A close friend, [le journaliste] Mohamed Durban, was assassinated. I learned this by reading the AFP thread when I was a researcher at Radio-Canada. A bomb destroyed a police station 200 meters from my brother’s house. His ceiling was completely cracked. »

“I lived with the guilt of leaving. We never break with our past. »

He did not return to Algeria, where he was born in a seaside village in Kabylie, throughout the “black decade”. “My family didn’t want me to come and I didn’t want to embarrass my family. When I went there in 2001, I had become a new ear for my friends, who told me the horror stories they had lived through and which they no longer told to each other. »

The attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States marked a turning point in his career. A rare Arabic-speaking Quebec journalist, he has traveled to Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Territories.

“You never wanted to be a correspondent?”

– It was my dream! I tried two or three times to get the job in Jerusalem. I was also a candidate for Paris and Beirut. It did not work. Maybe the decision-makers thought I was a better reporter than a correspondent. I said to myself with hindsight that the best of worlds for me was to live in Montreal and be able to travel. »

In his reports, both here and abroad, he has found that people on the street confide their suffering more readily to him than to neighbours, friends or family members. He was this “new ear”, as he puts it. With great listening quality, in my opinion. Akli Aït Abdallah is a journalist who takes his time. Who does not point his microphone under the nose of the interviewees.

We spent two hours at the café, talking about this and that, about the plight of the Inuit people in the neighborhood he lives in downtown as well as our common passion for English soccer. He is a “rookie” from Manchester. I am a “red”. We are supporters of clubs as rivals as the Nordiques and the Canadiens at the time of his arrival in Quebec. I won’t hold it against him.

If there is one passion that transpires in him, it is the one he dedicates to his job. He made friends with several of his fixers, those who facilitate the work of reporters abroad. Amar, for example, who was preparing a doctorate in Baghdad on feminine beauty in the poetry of Aragon, and who became a journalist.

I notice him, it seems so revealing of his personality: he remembers the names of people he interviewed for reports 10, 15 or 20 years ago. Not public figures, not stars, but both ordinary and extraordinary people who confided in him. “I’m interested in telling their story well, because they trusted me,” he said simply.

Unlike others, he never looked for the “right story”. One that sometimes attracts more opportunistic journalists more for the potential coup than for the public interest. He never placed himself in front of his subject.

“I’ve always tried to talk as little as possible, to let people speak,” he says.

He also always feared that the people he interviewed would feel betrayed by his reporting. “Maybe a little too much! It may have led me to make compromises. To agree to withdraw the compromising comment of an employee of a community organization towards his boss, for example. I could never have been an investigative journalist! he laughs.

“It’s cliché to say that, but it’s a wonderful job…” Why leave him, then? Because he no longer has the strength to manage the stress which, he recalls, is inherent in the job. “You have to have an anxious temperament at the start to be a journalist,” he believes. Some have it worse than others! »

He wants to continue to do journalism, but at his own pace, and perhaps offer training to young journalists who go into reporting.

“The more the years passed, the more the stress grew, he confides to me. The stress of not sleeping at night because you have a story to edit or because you write things down at 3 a.m. that you are afraid to forget. We tell ourselves that over time, with experience, the stress will be less, but that’s not true. I turned 66 this summer. It’s not outrageous to retire at 66! I will have more time to watch football matches! »

In effect. Happy retirement, my dear.

Questionnaire without filter

Coffee and me: My coffee ? Elongate. Like me. I am thinking of the cafes whose doors I have walked through 100 times in Cairo, Beirut, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Damascus, and elsewhere, to escape for a few moments from the noise of the street and the din of the world, to hear better the pulse beats of these cities of great multitudes. And I often, very often, came out of it — from those smoky cafes — with a story to tell, born out of the happy and hazardous encounter with life, with people, quite simply.

My favorite author: Dany Laferriere. For The Smell of Coffee. And the rest of his work.