There are these breathless lives, boosted by adrenaline and a sense of duty, which allow, through reports from all over the world, to be privileged witnesses of history. Driven “by a never completely quenched thirst to understand and explain” the world, journalist Alexandra Szacka recounted for 35 years, on Télé-Québec and then on Radio-Canada, the lives and destinies she met on the place Tian’anmen, in the Bolivian jungle, in Cité-Soleil or in Kandahar. In his story I will travel around the worldpublished by Boréal, the journalist takes a look behind the scenes of her reports and on the heartbreaks and struggles concealed under this career led to the heady rhythm of current events.
“I wanted to record everything that I experienced”, indicates in an interview the one who landed from the “carousel of daily information” in January 2020. “It is not only [le récit] events that marked the history of the planet [qui se trouve dans ce livre]but also reflections on the profession of journalist and on the fact of being a woman journalist on television in the 1990s, when it was an environment dominated by men”, explains Alexandra Szacka, passing through Montreal this week, far from the small fortified town of Lucca, in Tuscany, where she has taken up residence in recent years.
Arriving by boat “at the foot of Habitat 67” at the age of 16, the young Polish woman of the Jewish faith quickly learned French at the time “by listening to the monologues of Yvon Deschamps” and by reading “the writings of Pierre Vallières”. “I decide that this story, that of the fight for the French language and Quebec culture in North America, will also be mine,” she wrote. In Trois-Rivières, where she settled with her mother, her stepfather (who were both hired as professors at UQTR) and her two sisters (one of whom, Agnès Gruda, would become a journalist at The Press), the young Alexandra was, in 1969, the only immigrant in her class.
A multi-faceted identity that will govern his life and certainly his career as well. Since pure and hard objectivity is an illusory quest, she argues in her book. “How could a journalist, who is also a citizen, who votes in elections, who has a sensitivity of his own, forged by his own history and the place he occupies in the social hierarchy, leave all that to the locker room when it comes to showing, describing, analyzing the realities that surround it? she asks herself.
The same event can be covered in multiple ways according to the sensitivities of each, adds in an interview the one who won two Judith-Jasmin awards and a Gémeaux award. “But the facts exist, and that’s what’s important […], to establish the truth”, she insists. A challenge that has become even greater and more fundamental for journalists in recent years due to the multiplicity of fake news. “It’s an even more useful and essential job today than it was 30 years ago,” adds the journalist.
Behind the scenes
Over the 320 pages of the book, Alexandra Szacka reveals behind the scenes of the many reports she has signed for the show North South of Télé-Québec, then for Free zone, Ingames And THE Newscast of Radio-Canada, a channel for which she became a correspondent in Moscow and Paris. “I was the first foreign correspondent for Radio-Canada who was allophone,” she says proudly. We thus discover the tenacity of the journalist, ready to falsify official documents in Tunisia to be able to shoot images of the January 2011 revolt against President Ben Ali, her pugnacity leading her to create a diversion to neutralize the government agent. responsible for monitoring her in East Timor in order to collect testimonies on the repression of the Indonesian occupier or her humanity, leading her to welcome Chinese opponents who survived the massacre in Tian’anmen Square.
But I will travel around the world is also a book about the heartbreaks and struggles that have punctuated his career under the spotlight. “I have been remorseful all my life for leaving my children [derrière pendant que je partais en reportage] », Mentions this mother of two children. An identity of mother and another of international journalist, which were difficult to reconcile. “But I would redo the career I made,” she says today. We are not only a mother when we take care [de ses enfants] and that we make muffins, but also when we offer an image of someone who is accomplished. »
Like many of her female colleagues, Alexandra Szacka paved the way for many other female journalists. But the headwinds were sometimes tenacious, she writes, evoking “a certain climate of misogyny” which reigned at the time at Radio-Canada. “This atmosphere of boys’ club, salacious jokes and sexist comments was rather the rule, ”she explains in her memoirs, citing a few names around the corner. “My editor told me that it had no interest if I removed the names,” she specifies in an interview.
“I wanted to tell the truth, that’s all,” she continues. It’s not revenge, because I finally managed to have the career I wanted to have. […] But it was a long struggle to get there. A fight also led collectively by women journalists from Radio-Canada’s public affairs programs, who realized at the turn of the 2000s that they were paid less than their male colleagues. “In the 21ste century, in a Canadian public institution, financed by taxpayers’ taxes, systematic discrimination is practiced against women! » she denounces in writing.
But despite the discouragements and doubts, the intoxication of the profession has never left the journalist. Because “truth is not just a matter of belief”, writes Alexandra Szacka, and “understanding remains the last bastion against fanaticism, hatred and injustice”.