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Award-winning Dutch journalist Jacqueline Maris is back in the Netherlands, safe and sound after her reporting trip to Detroit last week during which she and a photographer were carjacked.
“I could have done a very positive story,” she said, “but there are drugs, gangs, wild dogs and garbage.”
In Detroit, she was struck by how much the entire city outside of the central business district appears to be in distress.
“It looks nice in downtown,” Maris said. “The Book Cadillac is very nice, and you see the potential. But when you get in the neighborhoods, it is very shocking. Wherever you go you see the houses that were once the houses of dreams. You see once there was a thriving life there.”
“People in Detroit seem very strong and resilient,” Maris said.
She’s not going to tell her listeners not to go to Detroit for fear of getting shot.
April 14, 2009
ReplyDeleteDespite mugging, Dutch reporter won't beat up on Detroit
By BILL McGRAW
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Award-winning Dutch journalist Jacqueline Maris is back in the Netherlands, safe and sound after her reporting trip to Detroit last week during which she and a photographer were carjacked.
Her three-part series on Detroit is running this week on VPRO, Dutch public radio. While Maris plans to include the carjacking incident in Part 3, she said having her rented Chevy Cobalt stolen at gunpoint will not affect the tone or conclusion of her reports.
She said she plans to construct a portrait of a city that goes beyond out-of-town journalists’ stereotypes of abandoned houses and car-company woes.
“I don’t want to stop where every journalist stops,” Maris said in a phone interview Monday.
“When you read about Detroit, you read about the auto industry, the train station and some collapsing buildings. There’s never people.”
Her desire to do a comprehensive report on Detroit doesn’t mean Maris — a veteran journalist who has reported from war zones in Africa and the Middle East — will tell a story that would be approved by the chamber of commerce.
“I could have done a very positive story,” she said, “but there are drugs, gangs, wild dogs and garbage.”
On the VPRO Web site, the reports are headlined: “Stories from a city in free fall.”
In other American cities she has visited, such as Boston and New Orleans, decay was limited to specific districts, Maris said.
In Detroit, she was struck by how much the entire city outside of the central business district appears to be in distress.
“It looks nice in downtown,” Maris said. “The Book Cadillac is very nice, and you see the potential. But when you get in the neighborhoods, it is very shocking. Wherever you go you see the houses that were once the houses of dreams. You see once there was a thriving life there.”
The reporting trip was Maris’ first visit to Detroit. Working with photographer Daimon Xanthopoulos, Maris spent nine days in the city, which is longer than many visiting reporters stay.
Each report will be 35 minutes long, an eternity by even American public radio standards. Xanthopoulos’ photos will appear on the station’s Web site starting Wednesday: http://weblogs.vpro.nl/buitenland/
Maris said Part 1 deals with the history of Detroit and the auto industry, and what making cars meant to African Americans who came from the south for the city’s good pay and relative freedom.
Part 2 will discuss people who are taking the initiative to improve life in the city, including the Motor City Blight Busters in northwest Detroit, the venerable Capuchin Soup Kitchen on the east side and parents in southwest Detroit who have organized to get rid of stray dogs.
“People in Detroit seem very strong and resilient,” Maris said.
Part 3 will tell a more personal story, partly through Xanthopoulos’ photos. Xanthopoulos spent time in Detroit during the winter, exploring the city on foot and met, among other people, a homeless single mother. They will tell of her search for shelter, and they will also discuss their experience of coming face to face with a 9mm pistol.
The carjacking took place in the former Brewster Projects, near Ford Field. Xanthopoulos handed over the keys to two men, one who wore a ski mask. Xanthopoulos and Maris fled; the thieves did not attempt to steal the journalists’ recording equipment or expensive cameras. Maris said Detroit police responded promptly.
Maris, 50, the mother of two sons, said she will use the incident not to illustrate her bad luck, but to tell a bigger story, much as she did when she witnessed atrocities while reporting on the Liberian civil war in 1993.
“I went home to safe Holland,” Maris said, where there is a solid safety net, and not everyone can own a gun and many fewer people fall into desperate poverty.
She’s not going to tell her listeners not to go to Detroit for fear of getting shot.
But, she said, she will say that in Detroit, “many people are trapped.”
Contact BILL McGRAW at bmcgraw@freepress.com.